Magnitude 7.0 Earthquake hits Haiti, They're going to need help Options

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Many casualties expected after big quake in Haiti

By JONATHAN M. KATZ, Associated Press Writer Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer – 2 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The largest earthquake ever recorded in the area shook Haiti on Tuesday, collapsing a hospital where people screamed for help. Other buildings also were damaged and scientists said they expected "substantial damage and casualties."

With communications disrupted there were no reports of deaths or injuries soon after the quake, as powerful aftershocks shook the country.

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It had a depth of 5 miles (8 kilometers). It was the largest quake recorded in the area, said USGS analyst Dale Grant, and the last major one since a magnitude-6.7 temblor in 1984.

An Associated Press videographer saw the wrecked hospital in Petionville, a hillside Port-au-Prince district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians. Elsewhere, a U.S. government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, said from his Washington office that he spoke to President Rene Preval's chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, just after the quake hit. He said Longchamp told him that "buildings were crumbling right and left" near the national palace. He said he has not gotten through by phone to Haiti since.

Don Blakeman, an analyst at the USGS in Golden, Colorado, said such a strong quake carried the potential for widespread damage.

"I think we are going to see substantial damage and casualties," he said.

The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. Some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes.

In eastern Cuba, houses shook but no major damage was immediately reported.

"We felt it very strongly and I would say for a long time. We had time to evacuate," said Monsignor Dionisio Garcia, archbishop of Santiago.

In Haiti, the extent of the damage was unclear.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official visiting Haiti. "The sky is just gray with dust."

Bahn said he was walking to his hotel room when the ground began to shake.

"I just held on and bounced across the wall," he said. "I just hear a tremendous amount of noise and shouting and screaming in the distance."

Bahn said there were rocks strewn about and he saw a ravine where several homes had stood: "It's just full of collapsed walls and rubble and barbed wire."

The U.S. National Weather Service issued a tsunami watch for Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, but said historically the region has seen few destructive tsunamis.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said U.S. officials were holding emergency meetings.

"We need to gather what information we can quickly. We will of course assist in any way we can," he said.

Felix Augustin, Haiti's consul general in New York, said he was concerned about everyone in Haiti, including his relatives.

"Communication is absolutely impossible," he said. "I've been trying to call my ministry and I cannot get through. ... It's mind-boggling."

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Despite criticism for the US military presence in quake-stricken Haiti, Washington says it has a long-term plan to stay in the country.

“We are there for the long term, this is not something that will be resolved quickly and easily,” US Ambassador to the UN Alejandro Wolff said on Thursday.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=11676...ionid=351020706



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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Hang on, Haiti

I'm working hard on an article re the sorry history of America's interventions in Haiti. But I felt compelled to write and share this short version as well, in limerick form.

Hang on, Haiti

America's got Haiti's back
Or so you will read on the rack
But if truth be told
The public's been rolled
America's got Haiti back

We occupied them once before
For years til 1934
We left them untethered
While bankers still feathered
Their nests off the backs of the poor

Our record's been jaded, at best
Their leaders served at our behest
We propped up their beast
And abducted their priest
While businesses paid off the rest

If none of this makes sense to you
You know what you now have to do
Just open your eyes
And your heart to great size
And let history enter through

Please learn from mistakes of the past
And from wisdom the Haitians amassed
If their truths we'd heed
They may yet succeed
And win their true freedom, at last.

posted by Real History Lisa at 5:19 PM

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/20...g-on-haiti.html

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Disasters are Big Business

by William Bowles

I am staggered. There are 10,000 ‘NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations) in Haiti, one for every 900 inhabitants and each one of them has no doubt at least one Westerner working within, yet aside from the Cuban health workers, it seems they could do nothing until the gringos arrived with their Blackhawks and nuclear-tipped aircraft carrier and of course, the 82nd Airborne, paying yet another ‘visit’ to this benighted and super-exploited land to ’secure’ the place for the locust storm of aid to come (too late for too many).

Now I’ve never been a fan of ‘NGOs’ not only because my own experience with them has been less than edifying but because they are the direct result of ‘benign neglect’ on the part of the state. In other words they initially appeared to fill a void left when states washed their hands of the mess they’d left behind or they just ditched their responsibilities.

But unlike governments who are, in theory anyway, answerable to their electorate, ‘NGOs’ are answerable to no one. They are not elected, they are not representative. In their way they are more like neo-colonial ‘stand-ins’ for the former colonizers, at least at the ‘social services’ end of things. Well, it seems many of the 10,000 have been tested and found wanting.

Now this is not say that there aren’t thousands, even tens of thousands of people who genuinely want to help (Brits have so far donated more than £30 million to Haiti Relief) but compare the role of the Cuban medical teams with most of the other ‘NGOs’ working in Haiti, all ten thousand of them. The Cubans have the direct backing of the Cuban state with all that that entails. Moreover, they were able to draw on their own experiences with disasters to which Cuba is no stranger and react immediately and effectively (not that you’d have seen it reported much on your TV screens but they were first on the scene).

I have no idea how many people in the ‘developed’ world owe their living to other people’s misfortunes but it surely must run into millions and given that the most advanced of the capitalist states now have largely ‘service’ economies under which I assume ‘NGOs’ fall, disasters make a major contribution to their economies.

The Media: Old habits die hard

Integral to this is the media’s vested interest in disasters (the bigger they are, the more profitable they are) and moreover, putting the right ‘spin’ on how the disasters are presented to the captive, metropolitan audience is absolutely vital as we have witnessed with the media’s ‘take’ on the Haitian catastrophe. So much so that questions are now being asked about the role the media played in stopping aid from getting in because it kept hyping the ‘violence’, ‘looting’ and ‘armed gangs’ aspect of the disaster.[1]

Just compare the media coverage of the Tsunami in Asia in 2004 with that of Haiti. Did we see daily headlines about the problem of ‘security’ or ‘looting’, or ‘armed gangs’ following the devastating Tsunami? No we did not. But why the enormous difference in the media coverage of these two, equally cataclysmic events?

The problem for the media is that they have already demonized the people of Haiti, not only through historically-rooted, racist myths about for example, ‘Voodoo’ (actually Voodun, an animist/ancestor-worship religion that came from West Africa with the slaves), but the way contemporary events in Haiti have been presented to Western audiences. You know the stuff, ‘gangs’, drugs, violence, the Ton-Ton Macoute, marxists, revolutionary priests, ‘failed state’, corruption, ‘dictators’ and dictators. This is the picture the media/state have presented to us. They made it so.

There is no history, no mention of our, that is Western culpability in the inability of the Haitian state to survive intact, let alone thrive and prosper after such a disaster. This is what the US, Canada and France have turned Haiti into: nothing more than a source of cheap labour for US offshore manufacturing and some tourism (who amazingly, still arrived just after the quake struck and took up residence.

“As surviving Haitians fought over scraps of food, luxury cruise ship passengers frolicked heedlessly Monday at a resort just 81 miles from the misery transfixing the world. Royal Caribbean’s gigantic 3,100-passenger Navigator of the Seas stopped at a north Haiti beach so tourists could parasail, snorkel and chow down on barbecue. The tourists went ashore at Labadee, a lavish and heavily guarded private beach leased by the cruise line where passengers bounce on trampolines, sip cocktails in a hammock and shop at an ersatz “native market.” — ‘Royal Caribbean cruise ships such as Navigator of the Seas still escorting vacationers to Haiti’ , New York Daily News, 19 January, 2010.

Haiti, formerly one of the richest of the Caribbean nations, has been denuded of its forests, import substitution (imposed by the IMF and the World Bank) bankrupted the rural population who were forced to relocate to the cities in order to survive, hence the scale of carnage. US-backed/sponsored/instigated coups litter the country’s history as well as long term military occupation. The West have turned Haiti into a ‘basket-case’ unable to respond in any meaningful way not only to the catastrophe but to care for its citizens. This is the West’s legacy, never mind its ‘largesse’ after the fact. This too is Business.

All of the above and more, underpins the way the media approaches a culture that has been under Western assault for two hundred and six years (since 1804 when the first free Black Republic in the (Western) world was declared).[2]

Is it any wonder therefore that it dare not go down the road that challenges the misconception that Western intervention is anything other than ‘humanitarian’ and because ‘we feel your pain’.[3]

The way media handles all things Haitian is perhaps exemplified by the issue of the Haitian ‘orphans’ being stolen by the West. I first came across a reference to it as a single sentence in a BBC piece and I referred to it at the time. The BBC piece just mentioned it in passing, but today, four days later the BBC ran a major news item on the issue (see below).

I found it incredible at the time and I find it even more incredible now that serious questions are not being asked by the media. How come virtually at the beginning of the catastrophe, with the airport barely functioning and/or crowded with planes, one hundred or so ‘orphans’ were whipped out, apparently to the US and Holland? The operation was surely pre-planned, how could it be otherwise?[4]

Yet the thefts continue with European countries cueing up to get their share of ‘orphans’. And it seems judging by the overall tone of the BBC’s piece, it doesn’t see anything wrong with idea. However, others are less sanguine:

“Bringing children into the US either by airlift or new adoption during a time of national emergency can open the door for fraud, abuse and trafficking” — Joint Council on International Children’s Services, a US advocacy group

“Orphan children charity, SOS Children’s Villages, has condemned media reports claiming that Haiti could be left with one million orphaned children as a result of the recent earthquake.

“SOS, the world’s largest orphaned children charity, says that the figures are massively exaggerated to generate big headlines and irresponsible as it presents a false impression of the real needs on the ground.

“SOS claims that providing for every orphaned child is possible and inflating the numbers can lead to orphaned children being unnecessarily removed from an area before extended families and best interests can be considered.

“The charity cites a similar over-reaction by the media to the Asian Tsumani in 2004 when reports were published of over 1.5 million affected children, “most orphans”, whereas the final total was around 5,000.”” — ‘SOS CONDEMNS MEDIA SENSATIONALISM OVER INFLATED HAITI ORPHAN ‘CRISIS’ , 19 January, 2010[5]

It seems Black Haitian babies are okay to ‘import’ to no doubt loving parents but not when they’re all growed up and able to make their own way there, as the cordon sanitaire being assembled around Haiti shows.[6]

Notes

1. One writer accused the major media of commandeering scarce resources (see ‘Journalists hindering Haiti relief?’) but I think it’s wide off the mark.
2. No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain! by John Maxwell, Black Agenda Report, 20 January, 2010
3. See for example, ‘Haiti’s Robespierre: The Tragedy of Toussaint L’Ouverture’ By BJÖRN KUMM
4. See ‘Orphaned Haitian children to be allowed into US’, BBC News Website, 19 January, 2010
5. See the Daily Mail’s hysterical pronouncement, ‘Crisis of the one million Haitian orphans as Unicef warns the devastation has jumped to ‘unbearable proportions’’, blown up a couple more notches no doubt by this typical Daily Mail piece which tells us “[A]id groups fear as many as one million more on the island have been left without one or both parents following the last week’s devastating earthquake.” One assumes that one million orphans represents 1 million dead parents or is that two million dead parents?
6. “The unprecedented air, land and sea operation, dubbed “Vigilant Sentry”, was launched as a senior US official compared Haiti’s destruction to the aftermath of nuclear warfare.
“It is the same as if an atomic bomb had been exploded,” said Kenneth Merten, America’s ambassador to Port-au-Prince, as officials estimated the numbers of those killed by last weeks earthquake to over 200,000.”” — ‘Haiti earthquake: US ships blockade coast to thwart exodus to America’, Daily Telegraph, 19 January, 2010

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=17143

[Magmak1]

Oil in Haiti - Economic Reasons for the UN/US Occupation

by Marguerite Laurent

This article was first published in October 2009.

Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery - an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers - Another economic reason for the ouster of President Aristide and current UN occupation (Haiti's Riches:Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti)



There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.

There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti's deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This is detailed in a paper about the Dunn Plantation at Fort Liberte in Haiti.

Ezili's HLLN underlines these two papers on Haiti's oil resources and the works of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin in order to provide a view one will not find in the mainstream media nor anywhere else as to the economic and strategic reasons the US has constructed its fifth largest embassy in the world - fifth only besides the US embassy in China, Iraq, Iran and Germany - in tiny Haiti, post the 2004 Haiti Bush regime change.

The facts outlined in the Dunn Plantation and Georges Michel papers, considered together, reasonably unveil part of the hidden reasons UN Special Envoy to Haiti, Bill Clinton, is giving the UN occupation a facelift so that its troops stay in Haiti for the duration.

Ezili's HLLN has consistently maintained, since the beginning of the 2004 Bush regime change in Haiti, that the 2004 US invasion of Haiti used UN troops as its military proxy to avoid the charge of imperialism and racism. We have also consistently maintained that the UN/US invasion and occupation of Haiti is not about protecting Haitian rights, security, stability or long-term domestic development but about returning the Washington Chimeres/[gangsters] - the traditional Haitian Oligarchs - to power, establishing free trade not fair trade, the Chicago-boys' death plan, neoliberal policies, keeping the minimum wage at slave wage levels, plundering Haiti's natural resources and riches, not to mention using the location benefit that Haiti lies between Cuba and Venezuela. Two countries the US has unsuccessfuly orchestrated regime changes in and continues to pursue. In the Dunn Plantation and Georges Michel papers, we find and deploy further details as to why the US is in Haiti with this attempted Bill Clinton facelift to the UN's continued occupations.

For, no matter the disguise or media spins it's also about Haiti's oil reserves, and about securing Haiti's deep-water ports as transshipment location for oil or for tank sites to store crude oil without interference from a democratic government beholden to its informed population's welfare. (See Reynold's deep water port in Miragoane/NIPDEVCO property- scroll to photos in middle of the page.)

In Haiti, between 1994 to 2004 when the people had a voice in government, there was an intense grassroots movement to figure out how to exploit Haiti's resources. There was a plan, where in the book "Investing In People: Lavalas White Book under the direction of Jean-Betrand Aristide (Investir Dans L'Humain), the Haitian majority "were not only told where the resources were, but that -- they did not have the skills and technology to actually extract the gold, to extract the oil."

The Aristide/Lavalas plan, as I've articulated in the Haiti's Riches Interview, was "to engage in some sort of private/public partnership. Where both the Haitian people's interest would be taken care of and of course the private interest would take their profits. But I think it was around that time we had St. Genevieve saying they did not like the Haitian government. Obviously, they didn't like this plan. They don't like the Haitian people to know where their resources are. But in this book, it was the first time in Haitian history, it was written in Kreyòl and in French. And there was a national discussion all over the radio in Haiti with respect to all these various resources of Haiti, where they were located, and how the Haitian government was intending on trying to build sustainable development through those resources. So that's what you had before the 2004 Bush regime change/Coup D'etat in Haiti. With the Coup D'etat now, though the people know where these resources are because this book exists, they don't know who these foreign companies are. What they're profit margins are. What the environmental protection rules and regulations to protect them are. Many folks, for instance, in the North talk about losing their property, having people come in with guns and taking over their property. So that's where we are." (Haiti's Riches: Interview with Ezili Dantò on Mining in Haiti.)

The mainstream media, owned by the multinational companies fleecing Haiti, certainly won't lay out for public consumption that the UN/US invasion and occupation of Haiti is to secure Haiti's oil, strategic position, cheap labor, deep water ports, mineral resources (iridium, gold, copper, uranium, diamond, gas reserves)��, lands, waterfronts, offshore resources for privatization or the exclusive use of the world's wealthy oligarchs and US big oil monopolies. (See, Map showing some of Haiti's mining and mineral wealth, including five oil sites in Haiti; Oil in Haiti by Dr. Georges Michel; Excerpt from the Dunn Plantation paper; Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin; There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people: Espaillat Nanita revealed that in Haiti there are huge resources of gold and other minerals, and Is UN proxy occupation of Haiti masking US securing oil/gas reserves from Haiti).

In fact, the current Haitian authority-under-the-US/UN-occupation that is in charge of regulating exploration licenses and mining in Haiti does not explain, in any relevant or systematic manner, to the Haitian majority about the companies buying up, post 2004, Haiti's deep water ports, what their profit shares with the Haitian nation are, where are the accounting of said shares owed to the people of Haiti, nor explain the environmental effects of the massive excavations of Haiti's mountains and waters going on right now. Instead, the Director of Mining in Haiti blithely maintains that "further research will be necessary to confirm the existence of oil in Haiti."

In an excerpt taken from the article posted Oct 9, 2000 by Bob Perdue entitled "Lonnie Dunn, third owner of the Dauphin plantation," we learn that:

"On November 8, 1973, Martha C. Carbone, American Embassy, Port-au-Prince, sent a letter to the Office of Fuels and Energy, Department of State, in which she stated that the Government of Haiti "...had before it proposals from eight different groups to establish a trans-shipment port for petroleum in one or more of the Haitian deep water ports. Some of the projects include construction of a refinery...." She further commented that the Embassy was acquainted with three firms: Ingram Corporation of New Orleans, Southern California Gas Company and Williams Chemical Corporation of Florida.. (According to John Moseley, the New Orleans company was probably "Ingraham", not Ingram.)

In the November 6, 1972 issue of Oil and Gas Journal, Leo B. Aalund commented in his article "Vast Flight of Refining Capacity from U.S. Looms",.: "Finally, 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's Haiti is participating with a group that wants to build a transshipment terminal off Fort Liberte, Haiti". One of the proposals referred to by Carbone was undoubtedly submitted by Dunn interests.

Additionally, we learn from this article that "Lonnie Dunn who owned the Dauphin plantation "planned to straighten and widen the entrance to the [Fort Liberte] bay so that super tankers could be brought in and the cargo distributed to smaller tankers for transfer to U.S. and Caribbean ports that could not accommodate large ships..." (Photo of Fort Liberte, Haiti).

We've put on the Ezili's HLLN website the other relevant portions of this paper that talks about the corporate eye the US has had, for decades, on Fort Liberte in Haiti as an ideal deep water port for the multinationals to establish an oil refinery.

In the 50s and 60s there was little need for Haiti's ports or oil as the Middle Eastern monopoly was gushing dollars galore. No need for these oil monopolies to undercut themselves by putting more oil on the market to cut their profits. Manipulated scarcity thy name is profit! or, did I mean capitalism?

But the oil embargo of the 70s, the advent of OPEC, the rise of the Venezuelan factor, the Gulf Crisis followed by the Iraq war for oil, all has made Haiti a better bet for the three-piece suits and their military mercernaries called "Western governments", yep, a way easier place to pillage and plunder behind the "bringing democracy" or "humanitarian aid" public covers.

Serendipitously with Haiti's 2004 Bush-the-son Regime Change, a follow up to the 1991 Bush-the-father's military coup, we find, flurries of Congressional "discussions" about off-shore drillings in preparation, perhaps, to the eventual "revelation" as written in the Dunn paper years ago, that "there is a need for supertankers that require deep-water ports which are not readily available along the U.S. East Coast - nor ...welcome...for environmental and other consideration will (not) permit the construction of domestic refinery capacity on the scale that will be required."

We underline that Haiti is an ideal dumping ground for the US/Canada/France and now Brazil, because environmental, human rights and health issues and other considerations in the US and in these other countries, would probably not permit the construction of domestic refinery capacity on the scale that new explorations of oil in this hemisphere will required. So, why not pick the most militarily defenseless country in the Western Hemisphere and dot it with such unsafe initiatives behind a UN multi-national "humanitarian" mask and fatherly Bill Clinton's snowy white hair and smiling face?

It is relevant to note here that most of Haiti's major deep water ports have been privatized since the Bush 2004 regime change in Haiti. It is also relevant to note here what I wrote last year in the piece titled Is the UN military proxy occupation of Haiti masking US securing oil/gas reserves from Haiti: "If there's substantial oil and gas reserves in Haiti, the US/Euro genocide and crimes against the Haitian population has not yet begun. Ayisyen leve zye nou anwo, kenbe red. Nou fèk komanse goumen. (Read again, John Maxwell's Is there oil in Haiti.)

The revelations of Dr. Georges Michel and the Dunn Plantation papers seem to positively answer the question that there is substantail oil reserves in Haiti. And our Ezili Dantò Witness Project information is that it's indeed being tapped and contracted out, but not for the benefit of Haitians or Haiti's authentic development. That's why there was a need to marginalize the Haitian masses through the ouster of Haiti's democratically elected Aristide government and put in the UN guns and UN occupation that today masks the US/Euros' (with a piece to the new power that is Brazil) securing Haiti's oil and gas reserves and other mineral riches such as gold, copper, diamond and underwater treasures. (Majescor and SACG Discover a New Copper-Gold in Haiti, Oct. 6, 2009; See, Haiti's Riches and There is a multinational conspiracy to illegally take the mineral resources of the Haitian people: Espaillat Nanita revealed that in Haiti there are huge resources of gold and other minerals.)

Today, the US and Euros say they are happy with Haiti's "security gains" and "stable" government. To wit: the last elections the US/UN presided over in Haiti excluded Haiti's majority party from participation. Haiti's jails are filled, indefinitely detained without trial or hearings, since 2004, with thousands upon thousands of community organizers, poor civilians and political dissenters that the UN/US label "gangsters." Site Soley has been "pacified." There are more NGOs and charitable organizations - about 10,000 - in Haiti then in any where in the world since 2004 and the Haitian people are a million times worst off than they were before this US/NGO civilization (otherwise also known as the "International Community") and their thugs, thieves and corporate death squads came and disenfranchised nine million blacks. Food prices are so high, some resort to eating dirt in the form of cookies to assuage Clorox hunger.

Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, the head of Haiti's largest human rights organization was disappeared in 2007 in UN occupied Haiti with no investigation done. Between 2004 and 2006 under the Western occupation, first by the US Marines then the UN multinational troops headed by Brazil, from 14,000 to 20,000 Haitians, mostly who opposed the occupation and regime change, were slaughtered with total impunity. More Haitian children are out of school today in 2009 than before the US/NGO "civilization" came post 2004. Under the US-imposed Boca Raton regime ,Haiti's Supreme Court was fired and brand new and paid-for judges, without any Constitutional authority inherited from the people of Haiti's mandate, took the place of the legitimate judges and law officers and are still metering out paid-for rulings in 2009 under the UN occupation and international community's tutelage.

And, as a matter of power, privilege, inequity and the violence of neocolonialism, white-sex abusers and pedophiles are having a hay day and human trafficking of Haiti children are at an all-time high. It is no revelation that in the stakes of corruption in Haiti or in Africa that a great many of the foreign NGOs along with their bourgeois/elite/pastors/priests and others are destroying poor children's life with absolute impunity while being painted as "saints" in their press back home the better to raise more funds to masturbate on Black pain some more.

Yet, Special UN Envoy, Bill Clinton, tells us "I am serving the next two years as a US Special Envoy to Haiti...This is the best chance in my lifetime that Haitians have ever had to escape the chains of their past..." The former President added, "If Haiti pulls out of this it will be in no small measure because of the efforts of non-governmental organizations."

What that means is perhaps this is the Haitian subcontractors, ruling oligarchs and US/Euro military industrial complexes' best chance to finally impose their chains on Haiti for good. Tap Haiti's oil, keep it so poor it will be grateful for slave wages at sweatshops. Let sexual tourism and the white sex-abusers do as they will. Transfer quickly more Haiti properties to foreigners and render the "good" Haitians as maids, butlers and servants in US/Euro-owned Haiti tourist resorts like the rest of the Caribbean. Militarize Haiti so that dissent is not possible even as a thought. That's perhaps UN Envoy, Bill Clinton's "best chance in my lifetime" scenario for Haiti. Nothing else makes sense. (See, HLLN comment on new IMF figures indicating Haiti is no longer the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and Does the Western economic calculation of wealth fit Haiti -fit Dessalines idea of wealth distribution?NO! and Comparing crime, poverty and violence in the rest of the Hemisphere to Haiti and Pointing Guns at Starving Haitians: Violent Haiti is a myth and The Western vs the Real Narrative on Haiti and No other national group anywhere in the world sends more money home than Haitians living abroad.)

Going shopping in Haiti:

"It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. ----Emma Goldman

Though they exist and form the exception to the rule, there are very few Paul Farmers, Margaret Trosts or Bill Quigleys in the Haitian world. And even amongst "the exceptions," the number whittles down to almost zero in terms of foreign heroes who can be expected to go the lifetime-distance without making "unusual alliances" or joining the status quo that vies for the soul of Black folks. Few who would HEAR, Lila Watson who said, "If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together." This sort of thinking that inspires self-reliance not dependency and provide the respectful conditions for those in great need to, in liberty, dignity and identify, realize their own needs is not what compels the International Community in Haiti right now.

For, in the age of humanitarian imperialism, globalization, financial colonialism and neocolonial-violence obfuscated behind forced assimilation and cultural imperialism, what exactly do some whites or modern missionaries go shopping in Haiti for: sex, self-esteem, adulation, fun, challenge, adventure, the boost in serotonin-consumption, to exploit cheap labor, plunder Haiti's natural resources, for self-improvement, recovery, to use Haiti as in excuse to raise funds for their salaries and living expenses to live the old Dixie's planters' life with exploitation black sex on tap, or as an easy way to gain international expert credentials in any field and move up the socio-economic ladder at home and/or for securing the good tropical lifestyle with mountain and oceanfront houses, the waiters, maids, gardeners and seafood they couldn't obtain as easily in their Euro/US countries where they are the majority, ordinary, can’t use the white privilege inheritance without some scrutiny and are not as exotic and special as in neocolonial devastated Haiti. It’s all hidden, of course, behind the mask of being good humanitarians, altruistic charity workers and helping Haitians. (See also, Ezili Dantò Reviews Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking (a book by Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.); The Slavery in Haiti the Media Won't Expose ; Haiti's Holocaust and Middle Passage Continues; UN Peacekeepers and Humanitarian Aid Workers raping, molesting and abusing Haitian children; The-To-Tell-The-Truth-About-Haiti Forum 2009; I am the History of Rape: HLLN Letter to UN asking for investigative reports on UN soldier's rapes in Haiti; and, Proposed solutions to create a new paradigm.)


Marguerite Laurent/Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, political and social commentator, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. For more go to Marguerite Laurent/Ezili Dantò website at http://www.ezilidanto.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...a&aid=17149

[Magmak1]

Haiti: Bonanza for Foreign Mining Companies
Interview with Marguerite Laurent / Ezili Dantò

by Chris Scott


Global Research, January 23, 2010
CKUT - 2009-04-29

Chris Scott: This is Chris Scott for CKUT radio 90.3 FM Montreal interviewing Ms. Marguerite Laurent[/Ezili Dantò] of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN).

Ms. Laurent welcome to the program.

Marguerite Laurent/Ezili Dantò: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Chris Scott: Thanks.

We wanted to talk today... and I understand your organization has been following the issue of foreign mining companies coming to Haiti and prospecting.

Especially in the North of Haiti.

There are now at least three Canadian companies prospecting for gold and copper in Northeast Haiti and two of these companies have really expanded their operations within this past year. Why the rush to start mining in Haiti right now or to start prospecting in Haiti, right now, in the middle of a recession of all things?

Ezili Dantò: Well perhaps because Haiti right now is under occupation and the people, their voice is not being heard.

This is a very good time for foreign companies to be granted concessions, because the folks in office are not representing the people of Haiti.

Chris Scott: And I guess you've talked about the fact that these companies obviously, they look for what they call a "secure business climate." For presumably a low regulatory environment.

Can you describe a bit more for listeners what the situation is for regulation in Haiti right now?

Because Haiti does have officially an elected government, but the country is also under occupation.

What happens on the ground?

Who makes the decisions?

Who calls the shots?

Ezili Dantò: Well, technically with regards to mining there is this thing called the Bureau of Mines [and Energy] and its under the Ministry of Public Works in Haiti.

But what folks have to understand is the history of what's been going on with respect to Haiti.

Between 1991 and 1994 there was a Coup d'etat.

It was - 91 was the first Coup d'etat against President Jean Betrand Aristide and in those times, foreign companies, whenever, during Coup D'etats they get lots of concessions and so forth.

In terms of Haitian mineral rights and gold and bauxite, all the various minerals of Haiti.

I mean people don't think of those things about Haiti.

And this is one of those things my organization want folks to understand.

That the UN is not in Haiti, the US is not in Haiti, Canadians are not in Haiti for humanitarian goals or because they care about Haitian rights.

There is an economic track.

And so I'd like to be able to explain to your audience that in terms of the economic track.

Haiti has various sites, especially in the North, where in terms of Canadian companies, were talking about St. Genevieve, were talking about Eurasian Minerals, were talking about right now the new one that just came which is called Majescor.

Those are the three we are aware of. That doesn't mean there are not others.

But around the 1970s and 1980s there was a survey[s] -[1975 - Kennecott Exploration/1978 - Penarroya Exploration], a geological survey done by the UNDP [1983 - The United Nations Development Program], and they actually also put together a document [for the Haitian government] with respect to what is available in these areas.

In these areas now that are being mined by Eurasian Minerals; that are being mined by St. Genevieve up in the Trou du Nord up in the North and Northeast of Haiti.

These companies, specifically St. Genevieve, came into Haiti in 1997 and that was under the Lavalas government of President Preval.

And they got a [minimum] 25 year contract.

Now, when they got that contract with regards to Haiti this was during a time when the grassroots had their voice.

They knew what the resources were in Haiti and they felt entitled to share in the profits.

We have information where St. Genevieve was talking about how, you know, the Aristide government was not amenable to what it was doing in Haiti.

[Editor's Note: "Steve Lachapelle – a Quebec lawyer who is now chair of the board of the company, called St. Genevieve Haiti – says employees were threatened at gunpoint by partisans of ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The president at the time, René Préval, once an ally of Aristide, was elected for a second term last year, but Lachapelle says he has renewed confidence in the Haitian leader."] But now, these companies are having a great time. Once the Coup d'Etat had happened in 2004. There is no longer a worry about the people.

Because the people, their voices are not being heard.

Although we have an elected government that was... excuse me, an elected President.

The rest of the folks are Coup d'etat folks that have been left over or they are the folks that the parliamentary elections where the people really concentrated just on trying to get themselves out of, between 2004 and 2006, intense, intense repression.

Trying to get a government, or a president that they thought would represent them. But the Preval government is effectively at the moment a puppet government that's under occupation.

So, that's why you see the most exploration licenses being given out. In January, Eurasian Minerals, a Canadian company got 27 licenses.

We know that in 2005, during the Latortue imposed government, after the coup d'etat, that St. Genevieve they reaffirmed their license.

Now, in terms of regulations, what should people think about, when - if a company says they are having problems with the democratically elected government in 1997, but in 2006, excuse me, in 2005 after that government has been ousted, their contract, their 25 year contract is being reaffirmed and now they are having a great relationship with the occupiers of Haiti.

What folks should understand is this, now I don't have the specifics with regards to the St. Genevieve contract, this Canadian company.

But I do know that they have, they're up there in the North and Northeast.

Folks should understand, that when a Coup d'etat happens like the one that happened in 2004. And these folks that came in from the Dominican Republic who are supported by the United States and all these Neocons who wanted to get President Aristide out, the first thing that happens is that all the archives are destroyed; set fire to all the original archives, so that the elites, and the foreign companies who may owe money to the Haitian people, the Haitian government, they sometimes get away scot-free when the new imposed government comes on without paying anything.

So who knows what data from the first contract under Preval was taken out with regards to this 25 year contract that's St. Genevieve's.

Nobody knows.

All we know is that the St. Genevieve company reaffirmed its contract under the occupation and added five more additional permits.

So, in terms of regulation, what happens, nobody knows.

The Bureau des Mines...

I'll give you an example, the head of the Bureau [of Mines] is Mr. Anglade.

And around that same time he talked about, not mining companies, but there was an issue where there was an underwater exploration in Ile-à-Vache, which is an island in Haiti, somehow there was a dispute between the company and the Bureau des Mines and what happened was, out of the blue, someone, somewhere decided to move the contract away from the Bureau des Mines and put it into the Minister of Culture.

[See, The General Director of the Bureau of Mines and Energy struck by the announcement of the plunder at the sea-beds of Ile-à-Vaches ].

So these are some of the weaknesses of the Haitian regulatory system.

Number one you have these Coup D'etats, where what was done when there was a government of the people, we don't know what was reaffirmed in 2005 under the occupation.

Also we don't know who is regulating whether the properties [property owners] are being paid for that these people are excavating.

Whether the laws that require Haitian ownerships are being followed.

Because a lot of times these foreign companies have enough leverage to just buy a name, a Haitian elite, a person, give them some money.

And, in effect, who is going to... there is no serious enforcement of those subsidiaries they have to do that have Haitian participation.

Also, the Bureau of Mines with the various chaos going on; who is going to look at these contracts and enforce, for instance, whatever the guarantees were that the underground water, or the surrounding farming areas, or the air pollution, what happens, cause everybody knows the environmental devastation that happens with mining, the chemicals that are used in the air. Obviously, everybody also knows the wind levels when Haiti has hurricanes.

Like the devastating hurricane we just had recently that leveled the whole of Gonaives.

What happens when oxidation and all these various chemicals get, you know, travel up in the air. Who will be responsible?

Will these foreign companies have any responsibly for the health hazards that may happen?

We know because we are under occupation that there is frankly no regulatory framework that will enforce laws or even contracts.

These contracts, the so-called conventions with the Bureau of Mines, that St. Genevieve, Eurasian or Majescor have, the people of Haiti don't know about them. That's basically what's happening.

If there is, for instance, the guarantee that once they have dug up these mines and so forth that they are not going to leave the area devastated.

That there are some sort of reparations fixing the area, and if there are some damages, that there is some sort of money put aside for those damages.

Nobody knows any of this stuff.

Chris Scott: You mentioned earlier in your talking that some UN personnel, or peace-keepers I guess, with the MINUSTAH have actually been providing logistical support and in some cases been providing security to these mining operations in some of these remote areas.

Is that true?

Ezili Dantò: Absolutely.

We have reports all of the time, we have this project in Haiti called the Ezili Dantò Witness Project, we get reports from the various locals.

The latest one, a couple of months ago, was in Port-au-Prince, where we were told, that the UN soldiers came in, now I have to say, that most Haitians, they'll call anyone a UN soldier, if you have a gun, it could be some geologist or someone at a private security.

The point is, the UN soldier come in, they cordon off the area, put big containers in. And folks tell us that they can't see what is being dug [up], they can't see what's going on. They might stay in that area for a month, they might stay for a few days. Whatever they are doing, the folks that are the authorities cannot explain to their constituents what's going on. And so that's one of the things that's been happening all over Haiti.

All over Haiti.

I have an example of somewhere in the North, a mayor there that I spoke to a while ago, basically said to me; UN troops came into his town, started digging, cordoning off areas, and when he went to them with a delegation of the townspeople, and said, I don't know what you are doing here, I am the mayor I'm the authority here. They said, well listen, we have authority from Port-au-Prince.

And they didn't produce any sort of paperwork.

So do these foreign companies actually have the consent of the people at the moment ?

I would say they don't, for doing what they are doing.

Chris Scott: Is it your sense that the laws, in terms of environmental protection, in protecting communities that are near mining operations, is it your understanding that the laws just aren't applied?

Or is it the problem that the laws just don't exist?

Or do we even know at this point?

Ezili Dantò: The laws exist.

Whether they're adequate?

We don't know. Whether they're being applied?

That we know, they are not being applied.

Because if the people themselves don't know what's going on. And if the people themselves don't know what their rights are, or who the folks that are coming in are. Then that means, whatever those laws are, the mayor can't, you know, say that this X, Y and Z law requires that you get in touch with me first, that I know what's going on, that I am able to protect my people.

But none of that happens.

So whatever the law is, and I know that on paper there are certain environmental laws that Haiti has. But on paper.

Just like on paper there's supposed to be some sort of Haitian participation.

But, you know, it's all window dressing.

At the end of the day, they're not being enforced.

And as I said, ways of not enforcing it is destroying the archives.

So that nobody knows who owes what, or nobody knows... and then redo the data. Redo it under occupation.

So, that's basically it.

But folks have to understand, the Haitian people had experiences before, with let's say, the bauxite, where Reynolds Aluminum was in Haiti for a long, long time and after they left the place was just a crater.

The people wanted to know... I mean, we didn't benefit.

Chris Scott: What years are we talking about?

[Editor's Note: Reynolds Aluminum was in Haiti for over 20-years and closed and abandoned its bauxite mine in 1982. Click here for some photos of the old Reynolds Aluminum facility, dock, port, airport in Miragaone, Haiti and info on the 2004 purchase of the old Reynolds facility during the UN occupation and return of the wealthy elite's rule of Haiti.]

Ezili Dantò: I mean, it was in the seventies.

So now when, see there was an education process in Haiti.

For the first time we had a democratically elected government.

And I remember that in 1999 when President Aristide was campaigning, for his second term, for the first time the people were given what this Lavalas party was going to do and it was called the "White Book." And in that book there was a list of all the various minerals and sites.

And it's on my website.

There is a map that shows where the various minerals are. So that between 1991 and 1994 [Note: - 1991 to 1994 are the dates of the first coup d'etat, this date here should instead be "between 1994 to 2004"] when the people had a voice in government, there was an intense grassroots movement to figure out how they could use Haiti's resources.

There was a plan, where the Lavalas government, not only told the people where the resources were, but that -- they did not have the skills and technology to actually extract the gold, to extract the oil...

Their plan was they were going to engage in some sort of private/public partnership.

Where both the people's interest would be taken care of and of course the private interest would take their profits.

But I think it was around that time we had St. Genevieve saying they did not like the Haitian government.

Obviously, they didn't like this plan. They don't like the Haitian people to know where their resources are. But in this book, it was the first time in Haitian history, it was done in Kreyòl and in French.

And there was a national discussion all over the radio with respect to all these various resources, where they were located, and how the government was intending on trying to build sustainable development through those resources.

So that's what you had before the Coup D'etat.

With the Coup D'etat now, though the people know where these resources are because this book exists, they don't know who these foreign companies are. What they're profit margins are. What the environmental protection rules and regulations to protect them are. Many folks, for instance, in the North talk about losing their property, having people come in with guns and taking over their property.

So that's where we are.

Chris Scott: Ms. Laurent, you're a lawyer.

You, I understand work on this full time. And I understand its a big, big, big problem.

But do you, are you able to do something in terms of the Lawyers Network?

Are you able to go and do access for information request?

Or something similar?

Are you able to actually go on site and get some information or take testimony from people.

How does someone who works on this full time try to shed light on what's actually going on?

Marguerite Laurent/Ezili Dantò: Well, number one, one of our biggest challenges is to tell the world that the powers that are in Haiti at the moment are not there to so-call "protect Haitian security." They are there securing an economic track.

They are there trying to secure their privatization, their neo-liberal agenda, their sweatshops and their use of Haitian resources for their major conglomerates, and Haiti's oil resources.

And as I said five [oil] sites, and that's not even including stuff that's in water [offshore.] So that Haitians are aware of with respect to own country.

[Editor's Note: For instance, Cuban territorial waters flow into Haiti waters.

See, Cuba oil/gas prospects and contract with Brazil for offshore drilling].

We, as an organization spend most of our time actually trying to uncover the information.

We have asked the Bureau of Mines for, let's say, the contracts.

We are ignored, obviously.

We'd like to see the conventions that has to be signed, between the companies, like St. Genevieve and the Bureau des Mines and Energy in Haiti.

We don't get those things.

We are pushing, obviously the various political figures, that are interested in the people's rights, to ask for these contracts.

To find out what's going on. So that's one of the things that we do. But the primary stuff is just to establish that Haiti has resources.

I mean, the colonial narrative is that Haiti is so poor, its a beggar country, and it doesn't have any resources that possibly Canada and these Canadian companies could want to go into Haiti and excavate for. So that's why programs like yours are so important.

Because we get to tell the world that Haiti has gold. As a matter of fact, you know, there was an article that talked about Haiti is littered with gold. That Haiti has copper.

That Haiti has silver.

That Haiti has all these various oil sites.

That behind the UN gun, something is happening.

Chris Scott: Yeah. And maybe, you could just tell us just to make it explicit, the people that you're dealing with, that you are communicating with in the North of Haiti and elsewhere.

What are the concerns they have about the way exploitation is being done?

In terms of having their properties trampled, I can understand that very clearly.

But in terms of some of the longer term, some of the environmental affects, what have they communicated to you?

Ezili Dantò: Well you know, the kind of interesting thing is that, a lot of the folks, they don't know. They really don't know, some of them, that the extraction of gold and copper and so forth has this cyanide process, or this process that when it hits the wind, you have all the various poisons in the air that will cause public hell. The geologist, the Haitian geologists knows.

And they publish papers and we're working with them, in terms of the educational process, to let the folks know, you know, all the chemicals for instance deep in the veins of the rock when those chemicals go and they seep through, you have this possibility of, you know...

Haiti is a country that's so fragile already.

Everyone knows that deforestation is a problem.

Everyone knows that the last hurricanes destroyed the whole city of Gonaives.

Which is almost about 350, 000 people were rendered virtually homeless.

There was a billion dollars in damage and this was because of the deforestation.

But imagine now that you have companies digging into the mountains of Haiti and leaving these craters and leaving these...

Chris Scott: Toxic chemicals.

Ezili Dantò... lethal sorts of illnesses, to the farmland, livestock, the water, the air that the extraction process will, you know, the leaking cyanide and other chemicals used in the extraction process will affect nearby farmland and the livestock and so forth.

So we don't have any reports yet with respect to those things.

As I said, you know, our resources are very limited.

What folks have been talking to us about are the UN coming in and cordoning of areas, or the "blan" coming in (they call foreigners' blan) coming in, and setting up their various mining operations.

That's what we've been told. We have not gotten information about livestock devastation right now. Because, everything is sort of...

We think things are at a small scale right now. [Editor's Note: Mining Haiti's mountains for extraction of raw materials for the construction industry is at a bigger scale and some of it has been steadily going on since before the 1980s, with perhaps Haiti-people orientated oversight/questions posed, only during the 1994-2004 people's governments.

The digging up of Haiti post-Bush Regime Change/Coup D'etat companies has intensified.

But it is the poor Haitian peasants use of charcoal for fuel that is primarily blamed for Haiti's soil erosion and deforestation].

We don't know to what extent that they've actually started their [gold/copper/silver...] excavation processes.

Because everything is cordoned off, Haitian's can't see in. That's really all I can say with respect to what's going on. We can't, we don't know what's going on inside.

All we know is that areas that Haitians were able to travel and go to, right now they cannot go to those areas.

So in terms of soil contamination...

I can say though, that we have noticed and folks in Haiti understand the difference between 2004 when this coup d'etat happened.

As I was saying, we had an empowered constituency of Haitians and grassroots organizations from 1994-2004, and there was sort of an impasse because there was a fight between the companies who had gotten their concessions and the people in congress in Haiti there was just an impasse.

Because there was a big discussion as to what these companies were going to be doing and how this was going to benefit sustainable development.

But there is no such discussion now.

Right now, all we know is that these companies are getting contract after contracts and the places are being cordoned off. And we can see between the 2004 and the 2008 hurricanes, the actual granite, the actual mudcake on the people's faces.

You can see the difference between a mudslide in 2004 and how much it's intensified in 2008. We can see the degradation.

And its happening because of the digging up of Haiti.

Because in addition to these Canadian companies, there are other companies that are digging up Haiti, for construction materials and limestone and all this other stuff - marble.

Haitian marble is on the international market a very important and its pure. The purity of these resources in Haiti.

The grade of them is so high. Minerals in Haiti the grade of it is so high. Because Haiti is one of the oldest land mass in the Americas.

And because Haiti is a land of mountains after mountains, that's [part of ] what Ayiti [Haiti] means, you have all these minerals inside of these mountains.

Our concerns of course is what's going to happen to the ground water.

What's going to happen to the air?

What's going to happen to the people?

What are the profits?

You know... and what guarantee do the people have that there is going to be any sustainable development, beyond some temporary jobs for miners?

Because we know in the process of gold and copper mining they need a lot of water.

Haitians wonder, where are they going to get them from. Are they going to build these dams. Who's going to enforce that there's no big accident, like that happened in 2000 in Romania, where one of these mining companies just leaked out these chemicals into the river.

The Artibonnite river is not that far. And it's where Haiti's breadbasket is. If that's contaminated, what are we going to do?

But there's no discussion of any of this in Haiti right now. Whereas under the democratic government there was intense discussion of these issues.

Chris Scott: If Haiti regains its sovereignty at some point in the future.

What is the way forward?

In terms of mining it, you'd still be dealing with these companies which are very cynical.

They'll try to get the best deal they can and damn the consequences.

Will the sovereign Haitian government still have to deal with these companies?

Will they try to mine in some way on their own?

Will they deal with companies like Cuba, perhaps, who have a different experience with dealing with foreign capital?

What is the way forward for Haiti from here on in?

Ezili Dantò: Well, the way forward, number one, is for Haiti to get back its sovereignty.

And I think there was an intense discussion between 1994-2004 and I think this discussion needs to be put back, that's what democracy is about.

I think that the plans the Lavalas folks had in their White Book, where there is a just partnership between the private sector and the public and the government.

So that the skills necessary, for instance, to do safe extraction are applied, and to protect the people are applied - with the understanding that a private company is going to want its profits, but also with the understanding that the Haitian people have an interest.

Right now the only thing that anybody is dealing with is the profit of the foreign companies, nothing with respect to the interests of the Haitian people for sustainable development, for health, for their right in terms of the ownership of the property.

There's none of that. We obviously need to have an engagement with the private sector who have the skills and the technology to extract these minerals, but in such a way that the voices of the people are heard.

That the environment is protected.

That there's guarantees, financial guarantees, that if something happens these companies will be liable.

They can't just jump off and go someplace else and leave some sort of a degradation.

But I think you are correct, with respect to, its been done its being done in difference places.

And we have to look at those places.

We have to look at folks who are friendlier to human development.

I think that's what the White Book was called: "investment in humans and the environment." [Note: The actual book title is - Investir Dans L'Humain: Livre Blanc de Fanmi Lavalas sous la Direction de Jean-Bertrand Aristide].

And Cuba, Venezuela and these folks who seem to be interested in their human capital are good partners.

And could be good partners for us at some point in time. Yes, I think that is something...

'Cause right now, there is a need, for instance, for fuel in order to run these mining companies.

What are they using?

And how are they using it?

If we can leverage this into infrastructure for the larger surrounding community, then that would be good. Not just these companies come in, they build a dam that only they use for their extraction process and so forth and the community is left with no development.

But if we can have an integrated holistic system where they come in and there is a development plan for sustainable development for sustainable economic jobs that are going to be beyond this arena - for water, clean water, for electricity.

Something where we work in partnership is what I think the Haitian people want. It's what they need. It's not that they don't want to see foreign companies in Haiti, it's that they don't want the companies to manipulate, so that you know every time we take one step forward, they bring us three steps back with a coup d'etat, destroy all the work that was done that put in some protection for the people, and then go back to just their profits.

Chris Scott: We were speaking to Marguerite Laurent[/Ezili Dantò] with the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network in New York City I believe. Yes. That's correct.

Is there anything else you'd want to add before we finish the interview Ms. Laurent?

Marguerite Laruent/Ezili Dantò: Yes, folks who are interested in really understanding the counter-colonial narrative, that's what we specialize in. And especially we want folks to know that Haiti has resources.

That it's because of these resources that you have companies like Eurasian Minerals, St. Genevieve, Majescor... and you have the Ottawa Initiative that's basically is being played out today, where the Haitian President is like third or fourth in line in terms of who has anything to say anything about Haiti.

Seems the first person in line these days is Ban Ki-moon and then Paul Collier and whoever comes in from the international community that somebody calls expert.

And so we want Haiti's sovereignty back. We want Haitian resources to be used in such a way that it helps with long term Haitian development.

And we want the folks to understand that there are five oil sites that have been documented with regards to Haiti.

We want the folks to understand that there are reports from the UN that says that Haiti is littered with gold and copper and marble and limestone.

And that there are various projects going on right now behind these UN guns. And nobody knows what is going on because there is no transparency.

There is no representation for the Haitian people.

Chris Scott: Ok. Thank you very much. And we'll definitely be speaking to you about this sometime in the future.

Thank you Ms. Laurent.

Marguerite Laurent/Ezili Dantò: Thank you very much.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=17165

[Magmak1]

The humanitarian myth
Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour, the author of The Liberal Defense of Murder, analyzes the propaganda manufactured to justify U.S. actions in Haiti after the earthquake.

January 25, 2010

WITHIN DAYS of Haiti suffering an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale, the U.S. government had sent thousands of 82nd Airborne troops and Marines, alongside the super-carrier USS Carl Vinson.

By this Sunday, a total of more than 20,000 U.S. troops were scheduled to be operating in Haiti, both on land and in the surrounding seas. "We are there for the long term," explained Alejandro Wolff, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The justification for sending troops is that there is a "security" crisis, which soldiers have to deal with in order to facilitate the distribution of aid.

The situation was and remains a needful one. The Haitian interior minister estimates that as many as 200,000 may have died as a result of the quake, and 2 million have been left homeless. Potable water is extremely scarce, and was so even before the quake. Only half a million have found the makeshift camps that provide some food and water, but have such poor sanitation that they are fostering diarrhea. Clinics are overwhelmed by the injured survivors, estimated to number a quarter of a million.

Since the arrival of the troops, however, several aid missions have been prevented from arriving at the airport in Port-au-Prince, that the U.S. has commandeered. France and Caribbean Community have both made their complaints public, as has Médecins Sans Frontières on five separate occasions. UN World Food Program flights were also turned away on two consecutive days. Benoit Leduc, MSF's operations manager in Port-au-Prince, complained that U.S. military flights were being prioritized over aid flights. Now, U.S. ships have encircled Haiti in order to prevent refugees escaping and fleeing to the United States.

Not only has aid been obstructed and escape blocked, but what aid does arrive was at first not being delivered, and then only in small amounts. Some five days after the earthquake struck, BBC News reporter Nick Davis described how aid had just started "trickling through." While aid was arriving in Haiti "in large amounts," some "bottlenecks" prevented the bulk of it from being distributed.

Asked why the U.S. was not using its air power to deliver aid to areas unreachable by road, Defense Secretary Robert Gates maintained that this would result in riots. The writer Nelson Valdes has described how U.S. and UN authorities advised aid workers not to distribute relief independently, as they would be subject to "mob attacks."

Eyewitnesses have repeatedly described how rescue workers are scarce on the ground, and relief nowhere to be seen. Hospitals that are functioning despite the wreckage complain of having no painkillers with which to operate on patients with serious injuries. Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health explained that:

[I]n terms of supplies, in terms of surgeons, in terms of aid relief, the response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been sent to places that were "more secure," where they have 10 or 20 doctors and 10 patients. We have a thousand people on this campus who are triaged and ready for surgery, but we only have four working [operating rooms], without anesthesia and without pain medications. And we're still struggling to get ourselves up to 24-hour care.

In effect, the U.S. has staged an invasion of Haiti, under the pretext of providing security for humanitarian aid, and in doing so has prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid. With Haitians in a desperate condition, and the UN-supervised government in dire straits, Washington has sent the International Monetary Fund to offer a $100 million loan, on the proviso that public wages be frozen.

The "security" operation, meanwhile, proceeds apace. As well as U.S. troops, thousands more UN police have been sent to Haiti. Already, UN troops, alongside the Haitian police, have been responsible for several killings, as they have opened fire on starving earthquake survivors who dared to try to retrieve the means of survival from shops and other locations. The US has also insisted that the Haitian government pass an emergency decree authorizing curfews and martial law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the decree "would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us."

This process has been facilitated by a flood of alarmist and often racist reporting about "mobs," "looters" and "gangs" causing a "security crisis." A "security crisis" validates a repressive response.

The Haitian police have justified their brutal massacres of "looters"--those securing their right to life in desperate circumstances--by telling the media that thousands of prisoners have escaped from the country's jails, and are running amok, posing a threat to vulnerable citizens. Police have been attempting to whip up fear among earthquake survivors, organising them into vigilantes to attack the escaped prisoners. However, as many as 80 percent of Haiti's prisoners have never been charged with a crime. "Gangs"--in the vernacular of Washington, the White House press corps and Haiti's business lobby, the Group of 184--happens to be a synonym for Lavalas activists.

For all the headlines, moreover, there is strikingly little actual violence taking place. Most of the stories of violence center on episodes of "looting," and most such instances involve desperate people procuring the means of survival. Aid workers also contradict the image of mobs on the attack purveyed by the media and U.S. officials. Abi Weaver, spokesperson for the American Red Cross, confirmed that "we haven't had any security issues at all."

"There are no security issues," said Dr. Evan Lyon. "We've been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There's no UN guards. There's no US military presence. There's no Haitian police presence. And there's also no violence. There is no insecurity." In fact, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, maintains that there is less violence in Haiti now than before the earthquake.

So if there is no insecurity, and if the US military intervention is actually obstructing aid, what becomes of the pretext for the invasion?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Humanitarian intervention

Notwithstanding this extraordinary performance, many American commentators actually approve of the U.S. response.

Jonathan Dobrer, of the American Jewish University in Bel Air, declared himself "almost sinfully proud of America." Steven Cohen of Columbia University enthused on the liberal Huffington Post that "We Have Reason to be Proud of the American Response in Haiti." New York Times op-ed contributor Jonathan M. Hansen called on the U.S. to go further, and use the Guantánamo gulag as a base for "humanitarian intervention" in Haiti.

Indeed, the label "humanitarian" is regularly applied to U.S. actions in Haiti. It is important to recall, therefore, that the overthrow of Haiti's elected government in 2004 and the subsequent occupation was itself originally cast as a humanitarian intervention of sorts.

Aristide, so the story went, had governed incompetently, his rule characterized by such corruption and violence as to generate countrywide disturbances. In recognition of his inability to govern, he supposedly "resigned" and fled the country. Filling the gap created by the absence of legitimate authority, concerned members of the "international community" prevailed upon the United Nations to send troops into Haiti and facilitate the development of democratic institutions.

Matters are a little more prosaic and grubby than this uplifting scenario would suggest. The U.S. had begun cutting aid programs to Haiti when Aristide was elected with an overwhelming mandate for his second term in 2000. The result was that the national budget was cut in half, and gross domestic product shrank by a quarter in the ensuing period.

The pro-U.S. opposition group, Convergence Démocratique, declared that it would not accept the results and instead began to agitate against the incoming government. Paramilitary attacks, beginning in the summer of 2001, were carried out by former death squad members and organized criminals acting in association with Haiti's business community. Former army personnel such as Guy Philippe, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, were organized by the U.S. under the rubric of the Fronte pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationale (FLRN).

By February 2004, a full-blown insurgency had been launched, and had begun to take control of large parts of the country. None of the Lavalas rulers had military experience, and they were not prepared to arm and mobilize the population.

Aristide, far from being a violent or incompetent ruler as his critics suggest, was eventually defeated because he was not prepared to violently repress an opposition that was explicitly organizing for his overthrow. His administrations had actually been highly effective in a number of areas, despite considerable pressures from the U.S. and the Haitian ruling class.

Lavalas can be credited with reducing infant mortality from 125 to 110 per thousand live births, bringing illiteracy down from 65 percent to 45 percent and slowing the rate of new HIV infections. It was obliged by the U.S. to accept "structural adjustment" programs, but did what it could to soften the blow by maintaining subsidies, implementing some land reforms, and promulgating certain social programs. It legislated against the exploitation of children as unpaid servants in wealthy homes. It reformed the notoriously labyrinthine judiciary and put several death squad members on trial. It also managed to extract some taxes from the rich, in the face of strenuous resistance.

For these humanitarian accomplishments, Aristide had to go. Once the dregs of former genocidaires and the criminal fraternity had wrought sufficient destruction across the country, the U.S. Marine Corps abducted Aristide on September 29, 2004. The initial line given to the press by James Foley, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, was that it was a rescue mission. The U.S. had stepped in, concerned for Aristide's welfare, and he had resigned voluntarily.

As soon as Aristide got hold of a telephone, however, he informed every news outlet that would listen that he had been kidnapped by U.S. forces. He was not permitted to return to Haiti, and an occupation began under a UN mandate, enforced by MINUSTAH troops. A new regime was imposed that locked up political activists and priests, and thousands were killed either by MINUSTAH soldiers directly or by gangs operating under their authority. A study published in The Lancet found that:

[D]uring the 22-month period of the U.S.-backed Interim Government, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area alone. Thirty-five thousand women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted, more than half of the victims were children...Those responsible for the human rights abuses include criminals, the police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.

Meanwhile, the democratic process that the UN was supposed to oversee has resulted in elections in which the country's most popular political party, Lavalas, are not allowed to participate. The recent senatorial and congressional elections saw turnouts depressed to as little as 10 percent as a result. This shambolic process has made life easier for Haiti's ruling class, and the multinationals operating in Haiti, but by no stretch of the imagination is it "humanitarian."

The point of highlighting this background is to note that, contrary to some short-sighted commentary--like Jonathan Dobrer: "We come, we help, and we don't stay"--the U.S. has a bloody recent history in Haiti and a well-defined set of goals in the country, including the desire to finish off Lavalas and create a benevolent investment climate for business.

The belief that the U.S. is behaving in a humanitarian manner in Haiti is at best myopic. At worst, it buys into the racist mythologies about Haiti that have been on prominent display in headlines and news copy for over a week now.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Paternalism and racism

The paternalistic assumptions behind the calls for 'humanitarian intervention' have sometimes been starkly expressed. Thus, the conservative columnist Eric Margolis lauds the history of American colonial rule in Haiti: "[T]he U.S. occupation is looked back on by many Haitians as their "golden age." The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder. This era was the only time when things worked in Haiti."

Purporting to oppose imperialism, Margolis insists that "genuine humanitarian intervention" is "different," and calls for Haiti to be "temporarily administered by a great power like the U.S. or France." He writes: "U.S. administration of Haiti may be necessary and the only recourse for this benighted nation that cannot seem to govern itself."

Similarly, right-wing New York Times columnist David Brooks, decrying the supposed "progress-resistant cultural influences" that he maintains holds Haiti back, calls for the U.S. to "promote locally-led paternalism." "We're all supposed to politely respect each other's cultures," he complains. "But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them."

To overcome this cultural handicap, Brooks recommends finding gurus who would promote a culture of achievement and responsibility--as opposed to the irresponsible, chaotic, voodoo-ridden culture that he identifies as Haiti's major problem.

It is unnecessary to dignify such caricatures by considering them as empirical hypotheses. However, it should be noted that neither author gives the slightest consideration to the persistent efforts of the U.S. government to frustrate the rise of popular, democratic movements such as Lavalas, nor to the IMF-imposed programs which saw real wages fall by 50 percent between 1980 and 1990, and which resulted in overpopulated slums and a failing rural economy.

Nor do they acknowledge the brutality of the UN occupation. While Margolis acknowledges that America's colonial rule was "sometimes brutal," his understatement is verging on euphemism when he omits to discuss the killing of 15,000 people as Haiti's rebels, known as Cacos, were suppressed.

Nor does he mention the humiliating system of forced labor that was imposed on Haitians under U.S. rule, or the fact that the gendarmerie built up under U.S. occupation became the organized basis for later dictatorships that would blight Haiti. In short, both writers bring to bear astonishingly little understanding of the country whose fate they are discussing so cavalierly.

However, what is of interest in these caricatures is the genus of imperial ideology that they relate to. Margolis is an old-school conservative (he describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican). He recalls in his phrases the manifest-destinarianism of William McKinley, who argued that the conquest and colonization of the Philippines was justified since Filipinos "were unfit for self-government."

In the imperial language of the U.S. and Europe in this period, self-government was conceived of either as a cultural state that only white people had achieved, or as a technology that only white people could use. Woodrow Wilson, the invader of Haiti, explained that the Philippines could not be given self-government by the United States, since "it is a form of character and not a form of constitution." Self-government is a cultural state attained after a period of discipline that "gives people self-possession, self-master, the habit of order."

For Wilson, only the "nobler races"--namely Europeans and white Americans--had achieved that state. Margolis would not be so explicitly racist, but his subtext is not the less subtle for that.

Brooks, though, is a neoconservative. As such, he brings to bear that tradition's paternalism, its concern with developing good patriarchal families, and particularly its culturalist reading of social institutions.

In this view, government and other institutions reflect an accumulation of cultural practices that have survived through generations. Capitalism and liberal democracy are thus the result of cultural influences such as Judeo-Christian values. The ability to govern oneself as a society is also said to be a result of cultural attributes that are generally found to be lacking in America's opponents. These discrete cultures do not necessarily correspond to older notions of 'race', but they perform an analogous function in permitting privileged U.S. commentators to applaud the conquest of other societies.

Thus, at the height of the Vietnam War, the "godfather" of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, argued that it was correct for the U.S. to support a right-wing dictatorship since "South Vietnam, like South Korea, is barely capable of decent self-government under the very best of conditions." Like the Black families that Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously diagnosed as suffering from a "tangle of pathologies," these people lacked the exquisite cultural refinements that made white Americans so successful.

These are exceptionally explicit commentaries. Most of those lauding American actions are unlikely to be as cynical or brazen as Brooks and Margolis. Yet when 20,000 U.S. troops arrive in a wrecked island country, and begin obstructing aid and beefing up "security" while people die in the wreckage of thirst and starvation, only the willfully purblind or those trapped in the assumptions of the "civilizing mission," could construe it as a "humanitarian intervention."

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m62555...;size=1&l=e

[Magmak1]

Freedom Rider: Useless Aid, No Donation Without Agitation

Posted Wed, 01/27/2010 - 01:02 by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“The time has come for a new paradigm: No donation without agitation.”

The United States has succeeded in plunging mainstream disaster “relief” into disrepute. “No donations to groups like the Red Cross, who sit on millions of dollars but do nothing but hand out blankets and move victims away from their homes in order to convenience the powerful.” And, especially, no donations to any group associated with George Bush or Bill Clinton.

Freedom Rider: Useless Aid
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Dollars must come with demands of non-interference in Haiti’s affairs and demands of accountability to charitable organizations.”

A telethon hosted by celebrities succeeded in raising more than $57 million in funds for the relief of Haiti earthquake victims. Yet that sum and the many millions more donated by individuals around the world will do little to relieve Haiti’s plight.

Haitians are living in their latest hellish incarnation created by American meddling and the crushing of that nation’s democracy. As long as the United States directs Haiti’s affairs, and empowers a corrupt elite instead of the will of the masses, suffering will continue whether caused by natural or human-made disaster.

The scenes of devastation, death and injury move most human beings first to empathize and then to take some action in order to help. The sad stories tug at the heartstrings and the miraculous tales of survival lift the spirit. However, in the absence of an infrastructure built by Haitians to help Haitians, the images do nothing but create a kind of twisted voyeurism. Bringing change to Haiti should not be the equivalent of gawking at a crash on the side of the highway.

“An illegitimate government whose very existence is opposed by the population is incapable of building new homes or treating the injured.”

Haiti is still ruled by a clique of criminals put in place by the United States government. Lavalas, the party supported by a majority of citizens, is barred from participation in the electoral process that is now a sham. An illegitimate government whose very existence is opposed by the population is incapable of building new homes or treating the injured. Haitians have already begun to scatter throughout the country in search of food and shelter, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars have been donated to help them.

The sad fact of the matter is that individuals cannot help Haiti or end human suffering anywhere on earth unless their assistance is combined with political action. The dollars must come with demands of non-interference in Haiti’s affairs and demands of accountability to charitable organizations. If the Red Cross doesn’t even spend all of its enormous contributions, as it shamelessly did after the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the Asian tsunami, then donors must stop giving before the next disaster strikes.

“The ‘bottleneck’ in Port au Prince was a direct result of the militarization of aid to Haiti.”

If American aid to Haiti comes in the form of military occupation, then even reputable organizations are unable to do their jobs adequately. Doctors Without Borders has had a presence in Haiti for many years, but flights containing 85 tons of their medical supplies were diverted to the Dominican Republic. Precious time was lost in the process of retrieving life saving medicines and equipment from another country.

The much talked about airport “bottleneck” in Port au Prince was a direct result of the militarization of aid to Haiti.The United States army decided who would be permitted to land and who would not. While VIP flights were given priority and created the diversion of medical supplies, the environmental group Greenpeace gave Doctors Without Borders use of a ship to carry less urgent equipment, allowing the medical group to prioritize delivery of its most desperately needed cargo.

It seems cruel to advise against helping human beings in need, but we have seen this movie many times before and we know the ending. The time has come for a new paradigm: “No donation without agitation.” No donations to groups like the Red Cross, who sit on millions of dollars but do nothing but hand out blankets and move victims away from their homes in order to convenience the powerful. No donations must be made to any group headed by a Bush or a Clinton. The old presidents’ old boys club did nothing for the Gulf Coast victims of hurricane Katrina. It would be not only a waste but a terrible wrong to give them another opportunity to collect funds which never seem to be used for people who need it.

“The time has come for a new paradigm: ‘No donation without agitation.’”

This earthquake should be the last instance of easy text message philanthropy. Instead of pressing a few buttons, concerned people should ask questions and make demands. Current and former American presidents should not be allowed to grandstand when their policies made life hell for Haitians in the first place. The first president Bush ousted president Aristide, Clinton restored him to power only after promises of “market reform” and Bush the younger kidnapped him and tossed him out of his country. Yet a Bush and a Clinton now have the nerve to pose for photos and behave as though they are interested in helping the very people they crushed.

There will always be hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. They are the inevitable results of nature at work. Starvation, illness and displacement are inevitable only if the people who create those conditions are permitted to continue their actions without opposition. It can be a waste to send money, even if the cause is a righteous one. Let us make this the last time we take the easy and useless way out.



Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=conten...der-useless-aid

[rla]

The challenge for the friends of Haiti is How to infest the Haitian people, US authorities and the Internation Aid
organizations with the meme" PROMOTE EMERGENT LEADERSHIP AMONG INDIGENOUS PEOPLE...I repeat...

PROMOTE EMERGENT LEADERSHIP...

[Livyjr]

PROMOTE EMERGENT LEADERSHIP...

RIGHT .....

SURE THING ....

YUP!

And so ...

"AP: Haiti govt gets 1 penny of US quake aid dollar"

By MARTHA MENDOZA, Associated Press Writer

27 JANUARY 2010

Less than a penny of each dollar the U.S. is spending on earthquake relief in Haiti is going in the form of cash to the Haitian government, according to an Associated Press review of relief efforts.

Two weeks after President Obama announced an initial $100 million for Haiti earthquake relief, U.S. government spending on the disaster has nearly quadrupled to $379 million, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Wednesday.

That's about $1.25 each from everyone in the United States.

Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just under one cent to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican Republic.

Relief experts say it would be a mistake to send too much direct cash to the Haitian government, which is in disarray and has a history of failure and corruption.

"I really believe Americans are the most generous people who ever lived, but they want accountability," said Timothy R. Knight, a former US AID assistant director who spent 25 years distributing disaster aid.

"In this situation they're being very deliberate not to just throw money at the situation but to analyze based on a clear assessment and make sure that money goes to the best place possible."

The AP review of federal budget spreadsheets, procurement reports and contract databases shows the vast majority of U.S. funds going to established and tested providers including the U.N. World Food Program, the Pan American Health Organization and nonprofit groups such as Save The Children, which have sent in everything from the $3.4 million barge that cleared the port for aid deliveries to pinto beans at 40 cents a pound.

"We are trying to respond as quickly as we can to this catastrophe of biblical proportions by mustering all of the resources that the United States government can bring to bear, first on rescue leading into relief, which is where we are right now, and hopefully seamlessly into recovery," said Lewis Lucke, U.S. special coordinator for relief and reconstruction.

Major relief efforts were launched within hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed at least 150,000, devastated the capital of Port-au-Prince and affected a third of its 9 million people.

Behind each effort has been cash and contracts, airline tickets to be purchased and ocean freighters to be leased.

Of each U.S. taxpayer dollar, 42 cents funds US AID's disaster assistance — everything from $5,000 generators to $35 hygiene kits with soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste for a family of five.

Another 33 cents is going to the U.S. military, paying for security, search and rescue teams, and the Navy's hospital ship USNS Comfort.

Just under a dime has already been spent on food: 122 million pounds of pinto beans, black beans, rice, corn soy blend and vegetable oil.

When purchased in bulk, the actual food prices are relatively low.

Pinto beans, for example, cost the U.S. government 40 cents a pound when purchased in 5 million-pound batches last week.

Getting the food to Haitians — paying for freighters, trucks and distribution centers, and the people to staff them, took another nine cents from each dollar.

Initial disaster spending was aimed at saving lives; now the spending is shifting to recovery.

The Obama administration is putting five cents of each dollar into efforts to pay survivors to work.

One program already in place describes paying 40,000 Haitians $3 per day for 20 days to clean up around hospitals and dig latrines.

That project also includes renting 10 excavators and loaders, at $600 each, and 10 dump trucks at $50 a load.

Just under one penny of each dollar is going straight to the shattered Haitian government, whose president is sleeping in a tent while struggling to organize an administration that was notoriously unstable even before the earthquake.

The U.S. rarely gives large amounts of money directly to governments, a practice that is "very defensible from my point of view," said John Simon, who coordinated U.S. responses to international disasters under President Bush's administration.

A final half-cent funds three Dominican Republic hospitals near the Haitian border, where refugees have been begging for help.

The U.S. is providing the largest slice of a global response that totals more than $1 billion in government pledges.

The European Union's 27 nations are contributing $575 million.

The U.S. also has long been the largest donor of ongoing foreign aid that Haiti depends on for up to 40 percent of its budget, with more than $260 million in U.S. money last year aimed at promoting stability, prosperity and democracy.

Private money also is flowing into Haiti — U.S. charities have raised $470 million for disaster relief, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the U.N. says total international giving — spent and pledged — has topped $2 billion.

The U.S. government funding flows through federal agencies that administer $2.6 billion already appropriated in the 2010 budget for foreign disaster relief, said Thomas Gavin, a spokesman at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

He said there are no plans to ask Congress for more money.

[Livyjr]

PROMOTE EMERGENT LEADERSHIP...

Another 33 cents is going to the U.S. military, paying for security, search and rescue teams, and the Navy's hospital ship USNS Comfort.

The Obama administration is putting five cents of each dollar into efforts to pay survivors to work.

One program already in place describes paying 40,000 Haitians $3 per day for 20 days to clean up around hospitals and dig latrines.

There is EMERGENT LEADERSHIP for you, rla, the U.S. military getting a third of all Haiti relief funds from the U.S. governement, while Obama pays the people of Haiti $3 per day to dig latrines ....

And so ...

[Magmak1]

Lots of foreign guns and foreign gunmen.

Not much relief.

Video:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/793.html

[Magmak1]

Haiti’s Earthquake: Natural or Engineered

by Stephen Lendman / January 29th, 2010

Human activity can cause destructive harm. Columbia University geophysical hazards research scientist, Christian Klose, studies how, including from mining. In a recent paper, he said:

“mining activities disturb the in-situ stress in the upper continental crust and can trigger earthquakes (human-triggered seismicity).”

Past examples are numerous:

* from potash and other mining in Germany since the 19th century;
* potash mining in Bulgaria;
* copper mining in Silesia;
* ore mining in Russia;
* coal and other mining in various parts of America, including New York state, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming; and
* coal and other mining in China and throughout the world.

Klose also says geophysical data suggest that the Zipingpu Dam, a few kilometers from the epicenter of China’s 7.9 magnitude 2008 earthquake, likely triggered it. In a December 2008 presentation at the American Geophysical Union, he explained:

“Several geophysical observations suggest this (quake) was triggered by local and abnormal mass imbalances on the surface of the Earth’s crust. These observations include (1) elastostatic response of the crust to the mass changes, (2) slip distribution of the main rupture, and (3) aftershock distribution.”

A follow-up issue of Science magazine explained further stating:

“the added weight both eased the squeeze on the fault, weakening it, and increased the stress tending to rupture (it). The effect was 25 times that of a year’s worth of natural stress loading from tectonic motions. When the fault did finally rupture, it moved just the way the reservoir loading had encouraged it to….”

Klose also says that two centuries of coal mining triggered the 1989 Newcastle, Australia quake, killing 13 and causing billions of dollars in damage. Data show that increased post-WW II production “dramatic(ally increased) the stress change in the crust,” setting it off and raising questions about how mining operates.

“You have two chances to avoid this, whether you reduce the hazard or reduce the vulnerability – so whether you mine in a more sustainable way or have urban planning in other areas away from the mining regions.”

In addition, Klose estimates that human activity caused one-fourth of Britain’s quakes, not just from mining. An Andrew Alden geology.about.com article headlined, “Earthquakes in a Nutshell” says:

“Earthquakes are natural ground motions caused as the Earth releases energy. The science of earthquakes is seismology (the study of shaking). Earthquake energy comes from the stresses of plate tectonics. As plates move, the rocks on their edges deform and take up strain until the weakest point, a fault, ruptures and releases the strain.”

Five major types of human activity cause them:

(1) Damn construction

Since water is heavier than air, the crust beneath it is greatly stressed, easily setting off shocks that mostly are moderate. University of Alaska seismologist Larry Gedney explained:

“Since the (Hoover Dam) reached its peak of 475 feet in 1939, the level of seismicity has fluctuated in direct response to water level. None of the shocks have been particularly damaging – the largest was about magnitude 5 – but the area had no record of being seismically active.”

Klose says dams cause about one-third of human-caused quakes. No wonder given their global proliferation, 845,000 according to Discover magazine, including 80,000 in America. Hoover Dam is the largest, storing 1.2 trillion cubic feet of water. China’s Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest, holding back 1.4 trillion cubic feet. In 1967, a human-triggered 7.0 magnitude western India quake may have been caused by the Koyna Dam. If so, damns in seismically active areas may be more destructive than believed.

(2) Liquid injection into the ground

In 1951, the US Army constructed Basin F at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal to handle 243 million gallons of contaminated liquid chemical wastes in about a 93 acre area. In 1961, another way was chosen — by drilling a 12,000-foot deep well in the Rocky Mountains to inject napalm toxic waste into the earth’s crust. From 1962-1966, 165 million gallons went in, likely triggering regional quakes and getting the Army to shut it down. According to seismologist Dave Wolney:

“If you are doing deep well injection, you are altering the stress on the underlying rocks and at some point, (it) will be relieved by generating an earthquake.”

Klose also worries about carbon dioxide sequestration, a process of compressing CO2 from coal plants and injecting it into underground deposits. They, too, can generate quakes close to cities, as that’s where facilities are located.

(3) Coal mining

Coal provides over half of America’s electricity and an even larger percentage in China. Mines produce millions of tons annually, extract up to a dozen times as much water as coal, and cause huge regional mass changes. They, in turn, increase stress that can cause quakes as explained above. According to Klose, mining produces over half of recorded ones.

(4) Oil and gas drilling

A June 23, 2009 New York Times article headlined, “Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears,” explaining that former oil man, Markus O. Haring, drilled a hole three miles deep in Basel, Switzerland prospecting for clean, renewable energy deep within the earth’s bedrock. On December 8, 2006, an earthquake terrified residents who remembered the devastating one striking the city 650 years earlier.

Haring terminated his project, but a US start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will use the same technology to drill deep into quake-prone areas two hours’ drive north of San Francisco for geothermal energy. The Energy Department backs it with more than $36 million, and several large venture capital firms are involved, despite the risk.

According the the Times:

“The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration’s support for renewable energy. Using the Basel method, it’s hoped a breakthrough can be achieved, even though it’s known that large quakes occur at great depths.”

Three of the largest human-caused ones happened near an Uzbekistan natural gas field, the result of liquid extraction and injection changing its tectonic action. The most severe one registered 7.3, and according to Russian scientists:

“Few will deny that there is a relationship between hydrocarbon recovery and seismic activity, but exactly how strong a relationship exists has yet to be determined.”

In regions with high tectonic activity, like northern California near San Francisco or Haiti around Port-au-Prince, extraction could trigger severe quakes. It’s believed Haiti has significant oil, gas, and other mineral deposits, including gold, copper, and coal. Perhaps drilling around Port-au-Prince bay, the Gulf of La Gonave, and the Island of La Gonave set off the quake, why US occupation and human neglect are related to it, and why America, France, Canada and other nations seek to profit from disaster.

(5) Large building construction

On December 2, 2005 Kate Ravilious’ UK Guardian article headlined, “Skyscraper that may cause earthquakes.” It referred to Taipei 101 in Taiwan, the world’s tallest building at 1,667 feet, weighing 700,000 tons. According to National Taiwan Normal University geologist Cheng Horng Lin, the building’s stress may have reopened an ancient fault. Before its construction, the Taipei basin was very stable with no surface ones. Thereafter, “The number of earthquakes increased to around two micro-earthquakes per year during the construction period (1997-2003). After completion, two larger quakes were registered, strong enough to feel at magnitudes 3.8 and 3.2.”

Lin believes that “the considerable stress might be transferred into the upper crust due to the extremely soft sedimentary rocks beneath the Taipei basin. Deeper down this may have reopened an old earthquake fault.”

Other experts are more cautious. UCLA quake expert John Vidale says “A building will change the stress on the ground under the building, but this probably won’t reach down to around 10km, the level where earthquakes occur.” Compared with dams, coal mining, oil drilling, and underground waste deposits, skyscrapers cause minor stress to the earth’s surface. Klose shares that view.

Other Earthquake Causes

A January 23, 2010 Pravda online article headlined, “US weapon test aimed at Iran caused Haiti quake,” stating:

“An unconfirmed report by the Russian Northern Fleets says the Haiti earthquake was caused by a flawed US Navy ‘earthquake weapons’ test before (they) could be utilized against Iran. (Something) went ‘horribly wrong’ and caused the catastrophic quake in the Caribbean, the website of Venezuela’s ViVe TV recently reported, citing the Russian report.”

After its release, Hugo Chavez called it a drill, preparing to cause an earthquake in Iran. [According to Athelo News: "All quotes subsequently attributed to Chavez regarding Haiti and earthquake weapons ... none of which was ever uttered by Chavez." -- Ed.] Russia Today said Moscow has the same weapons. The unconfirmed Russian report said America carried out a similar test in the Pacific Ocean, causing a 6.5 magnitude quake near Eureka, CA. No deaths or injuries were reported, but many buildings were damaged.

ViVe said the US Navy may have had “full knowledge” of the test’s damage potential, and speculated it was why Deputy Southern Command General PK Keen was in Haiti when the quake struck, preparing to act in case of a disaster, perhaps an engineered one. In his January 21 Global Research article, Michel Chossudovsky said:

“A Haiti disaster relief scenario had been envisaged at the headquarters of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami one day prior to the earthquake (since) pre-disaster simulations pertain(ing) to the impacts of a hurricane in Haiti” were conducted.

A “communication-information tool” called the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC) “links non-government organizations with the United States (government and military) and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts.”

When the quake struck, TISC was in “an advanced stage of readiness.” The next day, SOUTHCOM implemented the system. “The (DOD’s) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)” set up a relief effort among “a range of Defense units and various” NGOs and aid groups operating “as part of a carefully planned military operation.” Did DOD have advance knowledge of the quake so could act immediately when it struck? Was the drill’s timing a coincidence or something more sinister?

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the CIA was running “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building.” Held at the Agency’s Chantilly, Virginia Reconnaissance Office, it simulated a small jet hitting one of its four towers after supposedly experiencing mechanical failure. The media ignored it the way it’s suppressing the January 11 drill. It raises serious questions and great suspicions.

Earlier in October 2000, the Defense Protective Services Police and Pentagon’s Command Emergency Response Team conducted another exercise, simulating a plane striking the Pentagon — called “the Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise.” Coincidence again, or were these drills part of readiness planning for 9/11, with advance knowledge of what was coming? Was similar Haiti planning also preparatory to the Pentagon’s militarized takeover? Was the catastrophe natural or engineered, and is there another way to trigger it?

HAARP Technology: High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program

HAARP manipulates the atmosphere, climate, and weather for military purposes. Based in Gokona, Alaska, it’s a jointly managed US Air Force/Navy weather warfare program, operating since 1992, yet the HAARP web site explains its purpose as follows:

“HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere (the atmosphere’s upper layer), with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes. (It will be used) to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so that resulting reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site.”

According to Rosalie Bertell, a distinguished scientific expert and president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health:

HAARP functions as “a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet.”

Writing in Earthpulse Press on November 5, 1996, Bertell explained that:

“Military interest in space became intense during and after World War II because of the introduction of rocket science, the companion of nuclear technology…. During this time of intensive atmospheric nuclear testing, explosions at various levels above and below the surface of the earth were tried. Some of the now familiar descriptions of the earth’s protective atmosphere… were based on information gained through stratospheric and ionospheric experimentation.”

Numerous projects preceded HAARP, including:

– Project Argus in 1958 “to assess the impact of high altitude nuclear explosions on radio transmission and radar operations,” and learn more about the geomagnetic field;

– Project Starfish in 1962, using nuclear detonations to disrupt the ionosphere and assess the effects on the earth’s magnetic field;

– SPS: Solar Power Satellite Project in 1968, using Solar Powered Satellites in geostationary orbit 40,000 km above the earth to intercept solar radiation with solar cells that potentially could be environmentally destructive;

– Poker Flat Rocket Launch from 1968 to the present to “understand chemical reactions in the atmosphere associated with global climate change;” perhaps more to influence climate for military purposes;

– Saturn V Rocket in 1975 — due to a malfunction, it burned unusually high in the atmosphere (above 300 km) producing a “large ionospheric hole,” resulting in over a 60% reduction in “total electron content” over a 1,000 km area lasting several hours; all telecommunications over the Atlantic Ocean were disrupted;

– SPS Military Implications in 1978 to develop a satellite-based beam weapon for anti-ballistic missile (ABM) use; also as a mind-control/anti-personnel weapon by affecting the human brain;

– Orbit Maneuvering System in 1981 to study the effect of Shuttle injected gases on the ionosphere; it was learned they could induce holes;

– Innovative Shuttle Experiments in 1985 using gases to create ionospheric holes;

– Mighty Oaks in 1986 to develop x-ray and particle beam weapons;

– Desert Storm in 1991, during which the US deployed an electromagnetic pulse weapon, designed to mimic the electricity flash of a nuclear detonation; and

– HAARP since 1992

Bertell says its:

“related to fifty years of intensive and increasingly destructive programs to understand and control the upper atmosphere. (It’s) an integral part of a long history of space research and development of a deliberate military nature. (Their) implications (are) alarming. Basic to this project is control of communications, both (their) disruption and reliability in hostile environments. The power wielded by such control is obvious.”

“The ability of the HAARP/Spacelab/rocket combination to deliver very large amounts of energy, comparable to a nuclear bomb, anywhere on earth via laser and particle beams, are frightening.” Yet the public is told it’s “a space shield against incoming weapons (or) a devise for repairing the ozone layer.”

By modifying the ionosphere, HAARP can be hugely destructive. Potentially, it can trigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis, forest fires, and power blackouts over entire regions. It can disrupt radar, other communications, agriculture, ecology, and financial and other markets. It can use weather to wage war, and perhaps cause earthquakes like the one that struck Haiti.

The UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (1977)

Its Article I states that:

“Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party.”

Article II refers to “environmental modification (ENMOD) techniques (as) any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.”

Citing Ecology News, Sourcewatch.org defines environmental warfare as:

“(1) the intentional modification of a system of the natural ecology, such as climate and weather, earth systems such as the ionosphere, magnetosphere, tectonic plate system, and/or the triggering of seismic events (earthquakes);

(2) to cause intentional physical, economic, psycho-social, and physical destruction to an intended target geophysical or population location;” and

“(3) as part of strategic or tactical war.

Environmental war weapons systems can include chemtrails, chemical weapons systems (climate and weather modification) and electromagnetic weapons systems (climate and weather modification; seismic warfare).”

Other definitions are broader, including the use of depleted uranium and other environmentally destructive weapons, practices and techniques.

International standards on environmental protections during armed conflict date back as early as the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg. It stated that “the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.”

The 1907 Hague Regulations stressed restraint, saying “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited,” and the Geneva Conventions (including Protocol I and Common Article 3) defined the principles of international humanitarian law.

In 1973, the US Senate adopted a resolution calling for an international agreement “prohibiting the use of any environmental or geophysical modification activity as a weapon of war….” President Nixon ordered the Defense Department to review the military aspects of weather and other ENMOD techniques.

During the July 1974 summit meeting in Moscow, Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev agreed to hold bilateral talks to achieve “the most effective measures possible to overcome the dangers of the use of environmental modification techniques for military purposes.” Discussions continued in 1974 and 1975, resulting in an agreement on a common approach and language. The 1977 UN Convention followed, ratified 98-0 by the Senate on November 28, 1979. It took effect on January 17, 1980, but was violated thereafter by both sides.

Human environmental modification techniques (ENMOD) can cause irreversible damage. Yet international standards haven’t stopped their development.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/haitis-e...-or-engineered/

[Magmak1]

The kidnapping of Haiti
28 Jan 2010

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the "swift and crude" appropriation of earthquake-ravaged Haiti by the militarised Obama administration. With George W. Bush attending to the "relief effort" and Bill Clinton the UN's man, The Comedians, Graham Greene's dark novel about exploted Haiti comes to mind.

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured �formal approval� from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to �secure� roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now an American military base and relief flights have been re-routed to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US Air Force dropped bottled water to people suffering thirst and dehydration.

The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilation as he brayed about the �violence� and need for �security�. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens� groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even an American general�s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that �looting is the only industry� and �the dignity of Haiti�s past is long forgotten.� Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. �There�s no doubt,� reported Frei in the aftermath of America�s bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, �that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power.�

In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W. Bush�s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700 billion. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.

For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed George W. Bush to the �relief effort�: a parody surely lifted from Graham Greene�s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc�s Haiti. As president, Bush�s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans� black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically-elected prime minister of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him in Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti�s sweatshops.

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti�s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN�s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as �Mr. Nice Guy... bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land�, Clinton is Haiti�s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed �tourist playground�.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti�s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington�s �rollback� plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela�s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama�s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the US seven military bases to, according to US air force documents, �combat anti-US governments in the region�.

Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama�s next war. On 14 December, researchers at the University of West England published first findings of a ten-year study of the BBC�s reporting of Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of the Chavez government, while the majority denigrated Chavez�s extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.

Such distortion and its attendant servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American corporate media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=564

[Magmak1]

Formaldehyde-Laced Death Trailers to Haiti!?

Via: AP:

The trailer industry and lawmakers are pressing the government to send Haiti thousands of potentially formaldehyde-laced trailers left over from Hurricane Katrina — an idea denounced by some as a crass and self-serving attempt to dump inferior American products on the poor.
“Just go ahead and sign their death certificate,” said Paul Nelson of Coden, Ala., who contends his mother died because of formaldehyde fumes in a FEMA trailer.

The 100,000 trailers became a symbol of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s bungled response to Katrina. The government had bought the trailers to house victims of the 2005 storm, but after people began falling ill, high levels of formaldehyde, a chemical that is used in building materials and can cause breathing problems and perhaps cancer, were found inside. Many of the trailers have sat idle for years, and many are damaged.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating American assistance in Haiti, has expressed no interest in sending the trailers to the earthquake-stricken country. FEMA spokesman Clark Stevens declined to comment on the idea and said it was not FEMA’s decision to make.
Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said Thursday she had not heard of the proposal but added: “I don’t think we would use them. I don’t think we would accept them.”

In a Jan. 15 letter to FEMA, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the trailers could be used as temporary shelter or emergency clinics.

“While I continue to believe that these units should not be used for human habitation, I do believe that they could be of some benefit on a short-term, limited basis if the appropriate safeguards are provided,” he wrote.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=13394

See also:

January 29th, 2010 Children in Katrina Trailers May Face Lifelong Ailments
http://cryptogon.com/?p=2649


FEMA Trailer Manufacturers Knew About Formaldehyde, Findings Went Undisclosed
http://cryptogon.com/?p=2888

[Magmak1]

Saturday, January 30, 2010
America's Sorry History with Haiti
I just completed a long article on Haiti for ConsortiumNews.com, which will be published in two parts. Part 1 is up today - Part 2 should be up tomorrow.

There are some interesting nuggets related to George de Mohrenschildt's strange role in Haiti as well.

Start here: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html

And I'd love to hear your thoughts.

posted by Real History Lisa at 6:22 PM

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/20...with-haiti.html

######



America's Sorry History with Haiti

By Lisa Pease
January 30, 2010

With all the talk of America taking charge of Haiti for a while, it would be prudent for us to take a step back and review the history of our various interventions in Haiti, and the outcomes of those efforts.
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For there is another kind of aid that the people of Haiti need that isn’t being talked about. They need us to understand their real history, their culture and their potential.

They need us to stop patronizing them and interfering with their progress so they can realize the freedom they are still seeking two centuries after officially casting off the shackles of slavery. [For more on that era, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Haiti and America’s Historic Debt.”]

If there’s one lesson we’ve had to learn in Haiti over and over, it’s that the solutions to Haiti’s problems can never be imposed from the outside. They must be allowed to grow from within.

And we have to let those solutions flourish, instead of trying to shape them to the liking of our business class, as we have repeatedly attempted to do, with disastrous effect.

The Military Occupation

In 1915, the United States began a nearly 20-year military occupation of Haiti, ostensibly to guarantee the country’s substantial debt repayments to American and other foreign lenders. But historian Hans Schmidt, among others, questioned this motive, as he found that Haiti’s record of repayment had been “exemplary” compared with that of other Latin American countries.

The larger reason for the occupation, according to Schmidt and others, was to keep European financial interests (German and French in particular) from economically colonizing Haiti at a time when America, having recently completed the Panama Canal, was hoping to expand its own sphere of influence in the Caribbean.

And potential investors in Haiti, such as the United Fruit Company (whose name is familiar to anyone who has studied the CIA’s coup in Guatemala), weren’t going to move in unless the U.S. took over the government and brought stability.

To be fair, it’s not like America alone ruined the place. Haiti was a mess when the U.S. forces got there. Of the 11 presidents who had held office in Haiti from 1888 to 1915, only one had apparently died a natural death, and none had served their full term. Seven presidents were killed or overthrown in 1911 alone.

And from 1843 to 1915, Haiti had been through, according to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, “at least 102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections” or as one commentator called it, a series of “bloody operettas.”

Years of various colonization attempts had divided Haiti into an economic and cultural caste system that was in part racially based. The whites and lighter-skinned people often held the money and position; the darker the skin, the lower down the economic totem pole one was likely to be.

Efforts to spread modern technology among the peasant population fell flat, and working all day for someone else’s profit wasn’t much of an incentive for people who had few needs and were accustomed to scarcity.

In addition, many Americans who came to Haiti looked down on the native people, often due to racial prejudice. The Americans typically didn’t recognize the value of the natives’ knowledge, and believed that America knew what was best for Haiti.

One notable exception was Major Smedley Butler, who noted that “The Haitian people are divided into two classes; one class wears shoes and the other does not. The class that wears shoes is about one percent. …

“Ninety-nine percent of the people of Haiti are the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people I have ever known. They would not hurt anybody [unless incited by the shoe-wearers; then] they are capable of the most horrible atrocities.”

“Those that wore shoes I took as a joke,” Butler added. “Without a sense of humor, you could not live in Haiti among these people, among the shoe class.”

Ignorance and Arrogance

You’d think that if you wanted to help a people become a prospering democracy that the first thing you’d offer them would be an education. But over 10 years into the U.S. occupation, 95 percent of the Haitian population remained illiterate.

The one educational effort the U.S. put forward was the Service Technique, a training program in agricultural and industrial technology. The problem with that, as Schmidt noted, was that the elite “traditionally held that manual labor was demeaning, while the peasants were enmeshed in subsistence farming and were reluctant to risk an already tenuous existence in outlandish experiments that were fundamental to American technological progress.”

In addition, American arrogance even prevented an exchange of ideas that could have benefited American businesses. For example, the Haitians had developed a much more efficient way of farming cotton than the industrial farming methods employed by the Americans. But Americans pushed their own technology instead.

Not surprisingly, the Americans failed to win many converts.

What little profit Haiti did make, financially, was used to pay off American bankers, sometimes in advance of the payment schedule. Funding education and public projects -- the very projects the loans had been provided for -- were not the priorities.

Haitian laborers were paid pennies an hour to work 12-hour days. Raising wages was discouraged for fear it might cause capital to seek a more favorable climate.

In 1925 and 1926, in an attempt to make the country more attractive to farming interests such as United Fruit, the Marines took aerial photographs of the land in the hopes of creating a cadastral survey showing actual boundaries of property.

But the photographs were destroyed in a fire, and American officials for the large part refused to pressure the masses into selling their tiny, title-less but generations-held property to American businesses.

When the market crash in 1929 rippled around the world, Haiti’s productive coffee farms lost their markets, and the people returned to subsistence-level farming. Students began striking to protest the American occupation, and soon others joined in a general strike.

An early attempt at “shock and awe” failed as miserably in Haiti as it did in Iraq. The Marines dropped bombs in a harbor where a particularly aggressive group of protesting Haitians had gathered. But instead of cowing them, the demonstration seemed to instigate them further. The Marines had to fire on the group to disperse them.

Ultimately, the depression turned the tide of opinion in Haiti against its American occupiers, increasingly seen as oppressors.

By 1932, tensions had come to a head, and President Hoover began taking steps to end the occupation. President Roosevelt completed the action in 1934.

Evaluating the Effort

What did the United States leave the Haitians with in return for the occupation? The U.S. did bring them some years of relative stability, law and order. The U.S. built some hospitals and rural health clinics as well as some roads and bridges and airstrips.

But for all that, as a contemporary observer noted, “the Haitian people are, today, little better fitted for self-government than they were in 1915.”

U.S. military forces also killed thousands of Haitians in efforts to achieve security.

The aforementioned Major Butler became quite outspoken about the role he’d been forced to play. “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912…

“Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Did the U.S. learn from this failed attempt at nation building? No. The U.S. just kept intervening, with repeatedly disastrous results.

Cut to 1957. Whatever modernization was achieved from the U.S. occupation was already a distant memory. Bridges and roads had fallen into disrepair. The same drive that in 1934 took two hours to complete by 1957 took nine hours by jeep (in good weather) due to unpaved potholes and the island’s “wrinkled paper” topology.

And that was just one road.

Imagine a country without a telephone system, with failing bridges, ports with crumbling docks, patients lying ill on the floor of dirty hospitals, political institutions in shambles or even nonexistent. Imagine what you’re seeing now, post-earthquake, as the everyday state of things.

‘President for Life’

Enter François Duvalier, a Haitian man of medicine who became known as “Papa Doc.” He was an educated man, not a soldier. He was a black man who wore suits and ties. He looked like the kind of conservative figure American business interests could support.

But Duvalier was also an adept of Voodoo. He studied Machiavelli. He mastered his country’s history, and learned what hadn’t worked for his predecessors, and took steps to avoid their mistakes.

Despite the New York Times’ initial portrait of him as “mild-mannered doctor,” Duvalier, upon winning the presidency in 1957, became a ruthless, corrupt dictator.

Duvalier knew he needed to gain control over the military, since most of the previous coups against Haitian leaders had come from that source. He built his own private strike force, the Tonton Macoutes, and got rid of opposition leaders in the military.

He brought back the death penalty, which had been abolished for years. Private radio transmitters were confiscated. Journalists were followed, harassed, and in some cases beaten into silence. He quickly turned Haiti into a police state, ruling by terror and brute force.

In 1958, Duvalier hired a U.S. consulting firm to review his government and offer suggestions for improving its efficiency. And then he ignored their advice. He had already learned that the easiest way to get money from the U.S. was simply to raise the threat of communists in his country.

In 1961, Duvalier ran a slate of candidates for top government positions under his own name, and when they were “elected” (by 1.3 million people out of 1 million eligible voters), baldly claimed that he himself had been re-elected to a second term, as his name had been at the top of the ballot.

Second terms were expressly forbidden by the Haitian constitution. But since Duvalier held the military in tow, no one dared press that point. The U.S., however, refused to recognize the legitimacy of his claim, and President Kennedy promptly recalled the American ambassador in Port-au-Prince.

When Duvalier had first come to power under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. had given him aid money to help get him off to a good start. But after the sham of an election in 1961 and additional atrocities that followed, President Kennedy slammed the brakes on American aid and by August 1962 began closing out operations.

The 70-person AID mission was reduced to eight people, who remained to administer a malaria-prevention program and to supervise the distribution of surplus food. U.S. military assistance programs were cancelled.

(Duvalier later celebrated when President Kennedy was assassinated, and sent an emissary to gather some air from Kennedy’s grave site, among other items, so he could attempt, through Voodoo, to capture Kennedy’s “soul” and harness it for his own purposes.)

In 1962, Duvalier’s Foreign Minister threatened to block an Organization of American States (OAS) vote unless the U.S. gave him aid money. An angry Dean Rusk agreed, causing desk officers to joke that Dean’s expense account for the day read, “Breakfast: $2.25. Lunch with Haitian Foreign Minister: $2,800,000.00.”

American Backing

On his way to power, Duvalier had quietly suggested to some that he had American backing.

Indeed, Clemard Joseph Charles, an American with a variety of financial ties, became “banker and bagman” for Duvalier, paying off military officers to support Duvalier’s ascent to power. Charles was the president of the Banque Commerciale d’Haiti.

According to various witnesses interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s, Charles received funding from businessmen in Texas and had numerous CIA ties. Charles’ work included finding ways to join American capital with Haitian development projects. He also managed to obtain two American fighter jets for Duvalier.

In May of 1963, Sam Kail, an army intelligence officer working closely with the CIA’s Miami station, thought Duvalier might be of use to the CIA in their efforts to remove Castro from power.

(Oddly enough, Walt Elder, CIA Director John McCone’s assistant, told the Church Committee that the CIA was arming rebels in the hopes that they would overthrow Duvalier. A CIA document notes Duvalier had become intractable and that overthrowing him would help the CIA’s image, which was regarded in Latin America as primarily propping up repressive regimes.)

Kail asked Dorothe Matlack, who served as the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence in the Army as well as a liaison to the CIA, if she would see Clemard Charles in Washington, D.C., during Charles’ upcoming trip.

Matlack invited Charles to speak with her and CIA officer Tony Czaikowski, whom she introduced to Charles as a Georgetown professor. Charles, for his part, brought George de Mohrenschildt and de Mohrenschildt’s wife to the meeting.

George de Mohrenschildt was a White Russian who had befriended that “communist” Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of J. Walter Moore, a CIA officer in Dallas.

According to Edward J. Epstein, who interviewed de Mohrenschildt, Moore asked de Mohrenschildt to meet with Oswald, as Oswald had just returned from Minsk and Moore knew de Mohrenschildt had grown up in that area.

De Mohrenschildt responded that, while he knew there could be no strict quid pro quo, he’d appreciate some help from the U.S. Embassy to aid in an oil exploration deal he was trying to accomplish with Duvalier.

Matlack told the HSCA that Charles seemed “frantic and frightened” as he urged Matlack to get the U.S. Marines to overthrow Duvalier. (Czaikowski suggested in his notes of this meeting that a cousin of Charles might eventually succeed Duvalier. Elsewhere, Charles and de Mohrenschildt suggested Charles himself as a potential candidate. In 1967, Duvalier imprisoned Charles.)

Matlack was unnerved by the way de Mohrenschildt seemed to “dominate” Charles. Matlack wondered what the true nature of their relationship was, and didn’t believe the explanation they gave her -- that they were developing a jute business together in Haiti.

“I knew the Texan wasn’t there to sell hemp,” Matlack told the HSCA.

Matlack was so disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior that she notified the FBI liaison, about it. And she wasn’t the only one disturbed by de Mohrenschildt’s behavior.

Another witness told the HSCA that de Mohrenschildt used to follow people in his car, that he appeared to have “some intelligence connections,” and that a mutual acquaintance who swam in intelligence circles said some $200,000 had been deposited in de Mohrenschildt’s Haitian bank account (though not the one at Charles’ bank) shortly after the Kennedy assassination.

The money was later paid out, but the acquaintance wasn’t sure to whom.

George McMillan, who wrote a book that claimed James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King (a finding a jury did not uphold in a civil trial in 1999), and who was married to Priscilla Johnson McMillan (who wrote a book about Oswald and whose CIA file listed her as a “witting collaborator”), wrote in the Washington Post that he had once stayed with de Mohrenschildt and his wife in Haiti at their home in Port-au-Prince.

McMillan noted the de Mohrenschildt’s lived, “not insignificantly, I suppose, within the compound where Papa Doc Duvalier then lived. We had to pass through heavily guarded gates as we came and went.”

Why was de Mohrenschildt so close to Duvalier? Was he keeping tabs on the dictator for the CIA? Or was he keeping tabs on the CIA for Duvalier? Whatever the truth, this 1964 State Department document sadly sums up America’s priorities at the time when it came to Haiti:

“United States interests range from the need to protect American citizens and property interests to ensuring that Haiti votes on the merit of questions of importance to the United States and the free world in international organizations and forums. The United States also has an abiding interest in the social and economic welfare of the Haitian people.” [Emphasis added.]

In June 1964, Duvalier rewrote his country’s constitution so that it included a provision by which he could be named “President for Life,” and then had his hand-picked legislators “vote” to make him so. He now officially met anyone’s definition of a dictator, in full bloom.

Throughout both Duvaliers’ rule – “Papa Doc” and his son who was called “Baby Doc” – the U.S. sent selected Haitian officials to the infamous School of the Americas, where they were trained in torture techniques and other methods of oppression. The graduates were then returned to the Haitian military and civilian police forces, giving Americans increasing control over the military during the Duvaliers’ regimes.

“Papa Doc” Duvalier’s shrewd manipulations continued even after his death. He had made provisions for his son to rule in the event of his passing. Observers didn’t think the son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, had the grit to run the country.

But the son managed to hold the presidency for 15 years after his father’s death before a coalition of forces that included the U.S. ousted him due to the cumulative horrors perpetrated under the family’s rule and the disastrous economic mess they had created.

In 1981, Hurricane Allen ripped up the Haitian countryside as well as the usually untouched Port-au-Prince at a time when the Haitians were already in economic despair. Unable to vote in any meaningful way at home, many Haitians started voting with their feet, and left Haiti en masse to seek refuge in America.

No Haitians Allowed

But unlike the Cubans who fled their homeland, Haitians were not welcomed in the U.S. with open arms.

The new administration under Ronald Reagan claimed there was no racial bias, that the Cubans were political refugees whereas the Haitians were merely economic refugees. (It probably helped that the Cubans were fleeing a leftist government, while the Haitians were fleeing a right-wing one.)

When bevies of volunteer lawyers rushed to defend the incoming poor from Haiti, the Reagan administration, with Jean-Claude’s acquiescence, stationed a U.S. Coast Guard ship off the coast to head off refugees before they got to U.S. shores.

As part of this agreement, U.S. aid money to Haiti increased. In addition, a former World Bank official named Marc Bazin, whom the U.S. favored, was installed as the new finance minister.

But conditions in Haiti continued to worsen. Arable land was declining due to dramatic deforestation. Diseases still ravaged the island, including now AIDS. Literacy rates continued to be obscenely low, and corruption was as rampant as ever. And as usual, to control the populace, violence was too often employed.

By 1986, the citizens were in full revolt. Fearing widespread bloodshed, and urged out by the United States, Jean-Claude departed the country. Anything and anyone related to the Duvaliers and other oppressors became a subject of attack.

The Duvaliers sent Papa Doc’s coffin to France so the masses couldn’t get to it. Streets were renamed back to their original Haitian names. A statue of Columbus was toppled.

While Jean-Claude denied that the U.S. forced him out, he accepted a flight on a U.S. cargo plane to leave the country for France. (France had only offered him temporary asylum, but no other country would take him.)

Another series of revolving door leaders would temporarily preside over the country.

End of Part One
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013010a.html

[Magmak1]

America's Sad History with Haiti, Part 2

By Lisa Pease
February 1, 2010

The Haitians have a saying in their native créole language: Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. “Little by little, the bird builds its nest.”

Freed of the powerful grip of the Duvaliers in 1986, and despite a dysfunctional system, little by little, the Haitians undertook the difficult work of rebuilding their nation into a more democratic place from within.

They formed trade unions, created independent radio stations, initiated literacy programs, and built silos to store their grain so they could wait for better prices before selling their crops.

Meanwhile, a quiet, small Haitian man who spoke eight languages and who had declared capitalism a “mortal sin” was espousing a brand of liberation theology too radical for the Catholic Church that had ordained him.

In 1988, the Catholic Church expelled Jean Bertrand Aristide for preaching class warfare in a move that, ironically, made him far more powerful.

Undaunted, Aristide, called affectionately by the diminutive “Titide,” opened a medical clinic, ran a children’s shelter, and continued to speak to the people.

As Haiti headed into its first internationally supervised election, the U.S. was banking on Marc Bazin, now their chosen candidate for president. But the majority of the Haitians saw Bazin as “America’s Man” and refused to support him.

The strongest leftist candidate, however, was considered lackluster, and the other candidates were too little known to win.

On Oct. 16, 1990, just two months before the elections were to be held, Aristide entered the race. He called his movement and its followers the Lavalas, a créole word for torrents of water that rushed down gullies, sweeping away everything in their path. He summed up his platform in three words: “participation, transparency, justice.”

Predictably, the U.S. government, then headed by President George H. W. Bush, was disconcerted. One businessman probably summed up a lot of businessmen’s thoughts when he called Aristide “a cross between Fidel and the Ayatollah.”

Just before the election, Ambassador Andrew Young, at the request (he said) of former President Jimmy Carter, tried to persuade Aristide to sign a letter accepting Bazin as president if Bazin should win, in the hopes of forestalling a violent reaction from Aristide’s followers. William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, noted the Bush White House likely had a hand in this as well.

Hope, Then Tragedy

On Dec. 16, 1990, in the country’s first internationally supervised election, Aristide won with over two-thirds of the vote, proving the Lavalas worthy of their name. The margin also gave him the largest majority of any democratically elected leader in the Western Hemisphere.

But in a sad parallel to some recent U.S. elections, when the time came to vote for the legislature and other offices, turnout was light. An opposition-dominated legislature then thwarted much of the legislation that Aristide proposed.

Still, Aristide upset the status quo. He initiated “programs in literacy, public health, and agrarian reform,” Blum wrote. Aristide also sought to increase the minimum wage; he asked for a freeze on the prices of basic necessities; and he created a public works program to generate jobs.

Aristide also criticized the business class, accusing some of the Haitian elite of corruption. He also sent a youth group from Haiti on a friendly visit to Haiti’s neighbor to the west, Castro’s Cuba.

Aristide, who had survived assassination attempts in the past, created a private force that he could trust. He further antagonized the military by making temporary appointments to key positions rather than permanent ones. He hoped this would encourage good behavior, but instead it rankled those stuck in tenuous situations.

But perhaps Aristide’s greatest affront to the military was to crack down on smuggling and drug-running, which were rampant in Haiti. According to Robert and Nancy Heinl in their book Written in Blood, Aristide’s actions “were putting a dent in many officers’ life styles.”

Janus-faced America

Any student of real history can guess what happened next. The military overthrew Aristide a short nine months into his five-year presidential term.

And as Blum notes, while there is no direct evidence that the CIA or the United States supported the coup, given the CIA’s role in training and supporting the Haitian military, the coup could hardly have come as a surprise.

Bob Shacochis supports Blum’s suspicions in his book The Immaculate Invasion, where he wrote that President George H.W. Bush “swiftly announced that the coup would not stand, then just as quickly receded into embarrassed silence when informed by his staff that his own crew in Port-au-Prince not only had foreknowledge of the putsch but had allowed it to advance without a word.”

Shacochis decried how America had been essentially “Janus-faced” toward Haiti due to a the split between those in the U.S. willing to support a true democracy, no matter how messy, and those whose knee-jerk reaction was to decry the leftist president, despite the fact that “the Haitians democratically chose Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only Haitian president who ever attempted to lead his people out of darkness; the only Haitian chief of state who seemed to display an ideology beyond self.”

Initially, only the Vatican recognized the new government. The United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) and U.S. still supported Aristide. An embargo on oil and weapons was ordered, if not fully supported.

Once again, the desperate Haitians, suffering under yet another military regime, took to their boats and headed for Americas shores. The U.S. created a temporary camp at the Guantanamo base in Cuba to house some of the intercepted refugees. But it was clear from the start this solution would not hold.

Meanwhile, the gap between the rich elites and the poor peasants in Haiti bordered on the obscene.

As the Heinls’ described, “To provide additional generating capacity at Péligre [a hydro-electric project], water was being diverted …, further crippling agriculture, but in Pétionville the elite dined well off French wines and Norwegian salmon.”

The rich eschewed the unreliable public utilities and turned to private generators. And while the elite “could not avoid traveling on the ruined roads whose upkeep they refused to pay taxes for,” they bought four-wheel drive vehicles to navigate the rocky terrain instead -- an option not available to the masses, the Heinls noted.

The U.N. reluctantly began talking of the need for a full-scale military invasion to return Aristide to power. By this time, U.S. voters had ditched Bush Sr. in favor of Bill Clinton, a man who, on the face of it, seemed more sympathetic to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, despite the fact that quickly after the election, he vowed to continue Bush’s Haitian anti-immigration policies.

As President Clinton sought an agreement between Haitian leaders and the U.N. to restore Aristide for the remaining portion of his presidential term, a paid CIA informer named Emmanuel Constant was working with FRAPH, a paramilitary organization -- a death squad, essentially – he had formed in Haiti, to prevent Aristide’s return and to terrorize the ousted president’s former supporters.

Constant led an anti-American demonstration at the dock in Port-au-Prince when Clinton dispatched the first U.S. troops seeking to facilitate Aristide’s reinstatement. In the face of Constant’s demonstration, the administration lost its nerve, and the American troops turned back.

Trashing Aristide

At this point, an all-out effort was launched domestically in the U.S. by right-wing elements to keep President Clinton from authorizing another landing. Aristide was accused of inciting his followers to violence and of being mentally deranged.

A serious, if dubious, charge was made in an effort to turn the liberals in Congress against Aristide. A video was surfaced ostensibly showing Aristide urging his supporters to “necklace” opponents, i.e., to put a burning tire around their necks. But what did Aristide really say?

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, entered the following translation into the record, but added the caveat that the only tape he had seen had been obviously edited, so he was not certain this was fully representative of what Aristide had said. The State Department’s translation of the incendiary section read as follows:

“You are watching all macoute activities throughout the country. We are watching and praying. We are watching and praying. If we catch one, do not fail to give him what he deserves. What a nice tool! What a nice instrument! [loud cheers from crowd] What a nice device! [crowd cheers] It is a pretty one. It is elegant, attractive, splendorous, graceful, and dazzling. It smells good. Wherever you go, you feel like smelling it. [crowd cheers] It is provided for by the Constitution, which bans macoutes from the political scene.”

Combined with the spliced in shots of burning tires, this passage clearly sounded like Aristide was urging people to punish the macoutes in a violent way. But that was out of character with other parts of the speech, where he said:

“Your tool is in your hands. Your instrument is in your hands. Your Constitution is in your hand. Do not fail to give him what he deserves. [loud cheers from crowd]. That device is in your hands. Your trowel is in your hands. The bugle is in your hands. The Constitution is in your hands. Do not fail to give him what he deserves.”

In that section, clearly the law was the weapon Aristide was urging his supporters to employ.

Later, an Internet poster who claimed to be present during this speech vigorously denied Aristide had approved of necklacing:

“I was present at that famous speech when Aristide returned from the USA. The speech was taped and cut and spliced to make it appear that Aristide condoned...even encouraged necklacing; such *was not* the case. Aristide said that he understood peoples' desire to necklace, but he emphasized that it was positively immoral.

“He said words to this effect: I understand your desire to smell their burning flesh; but that is not the way of Jesus. We will win without violence; we will overcome. The anti-Aristide people spliced the tape to make it come out this way: I desire to smell their burning flesh. We will win with violence; we will overcome!”

CIA Report

That same day that Harkin entered the text into the record, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, had invited longtime CIA analyst Brian Latell to Capitol Hill to talk about the agency’s report on Aristide’s psychological state.

The report claimed that Aristide was a psychopath, had been treated for depression in a Canadian hospital, and was taking ongoing medication. In other words, he was too unstable to be returned to Haiti.

The problem was, none of that was true.

A Miami Herald investigation found that the hospital the CIA named had no record that Aristide had ever been treated there. Three other facilities in Montreal were investigated, but not one of them had ever treated Aristide.

Aristide had been hospitalized for hepatitis in his teens, but had never been to a hospital for any reason thereafter, and was not taking any medication. No evidence ever surfaced to support Latell’s claims.

Latell also told Congress how peaceful Haiti was under their man, former World Bank executive Marc Bazin, who had been appointed Prime Minister by the people who overthrew Aristide.

But Latell’s claim that there was no systematic or frequent violence against civilians lay in stark contrast to the record observed by human rights groups and others.

“Obviously, we have visited two different countries,” Amnesty International’s program officer for the region said. “That anyone could go to Haiti at that time and not observe repression by the military is absurd.”

Indeed, in Aristide’s absence, FRAPH had gone from heinous to horrific, forcing new members to watch existing members rape and kill people. During the initiation process, the members were forced to participate in the raping and killing.

Why would the CIA want to defend these murders over the leftist Aristide? According to the right-wing Washington Times, intelligence analysts were particularly concerned about Aristide’s opposition to privatizing some industry in Haiti.

And as for that longstanding canard that the CIA only follows orders from the President and never makes policy, the Washington Times reported on Nov. 28, 1995, that “The CIA’s Directorate of Operations … successfully opposed efforts by the White House to take covert action to unseat Haiti’s military leaders to pave the way for restoring Mr. Aristide to office, even though he had been elected in a popular vote in 1990, the sources said. They said such action was deemed not suitable.”

Turning to the Military

President Clinton, unable to persuade the CIA to do his bidding, turned to the military instead; there, at least, he was still recognized as Commander in Chief.

In the wake of the failed landing in 1993 that was intended to reinstitute Aristide, as the violence in Haiti perpetrated by the ruling military junta against its citizens increased, even the Army War College, hardly a liberal outpost, issued a 60-page report decrying America’s timidity in this situation.

Eventually, the trio of former President Jimmy Carter, Sen. Sam Nunn and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell were able to construct an arrangement that would return Aristide to power.

But by then, Aristide had only a year left in his term to serve, and by then, the problems he faced were even greater than the ones he had started with.

In addition, the agreement that brought Aristide back included a promise not to prosecute the coup leaders for their crimes. Forgiveness and reconciliation were the watchwords of the new Aristide administration. Justice was never on the menu.

Still, the public was so enthralled with Aristide that, after he stepped aside and let his hand-appointed prime minister run the country for several years, they voted him enthusiastically back into the presidency in the elections of 2000. This time he managed to serve three full years before being again ousted in a coup.

Aristide’s problems were compounded by the debacle in Florida that put George W. Bush in the White House. The new Bush administration went after leftists in the hemisphere with a vengeance.

Regarding Haiti, the Bush administration blocked loans that had been approved by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). These loans were targeted for projects that would provide health, education, roadwork and clean drinking water.

The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation was so outraged by this blatant obstructionism that it sued the IDB in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. The executive director of the foundation, Todd Howland, railed, “There have been actual deaths linked to the fact that the IDB never disbursed these loans.”

And to add insult to injury, the Haitian government had already paid $5 million in interest for the loan money it wasn’t receiving.

Annoying the French

Aristide made enemies in France as well when he tried to collect on a 200-year-old debt, dating back to when the Haitians won independence from France in a devastating war in which African slaves overthrew their slaveowners.

France remained covetous toward its former colony and demanded the equivalent of $21 billion in reparations. France, which had benefited from Haiti’s slave labor for many years, threatened to invade the country again if the ex-slaves did not pay off their former masters, and Haiti agreed.

In 2003, Aristide convened a four-day international conference to construct a plan to get that money back. France’s response was to ask Aristide to step down.

But the action that may have most directly precipitated Aristide’s final ouster might have been the one Aristide performed on Feb. 7, 2003: he doubled the country’s minimum wage. He raised it from $1 a day to $2.

This action was opposed by an organization of wealthy business leaders called Group 184, led by an American businessman named Andy Apaid, who ran a garment factory in Port-au-Prince. Apaid and Group 184 pressed constantly for Aristide’s removal.

Evidently, the business interests just couldn’t let a liberal leader do right by his people. Not at their expense. As Mark Weisbrot opined in The Nation (among other publications):

“The fix was in: The U.S. Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize an opposition -- however small in numbers -- and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.

“The whole scenario was strikingly similar to the series of events that led to the coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in April 2002. The same U.S. organizations were involved, and the opposition -- as in Venezuela -- controlled and used the major media as a tool for destabilization.

“And in both cases the coup leaders, joined by Washington, announced to the world that the elected president had ‘voluntarily resigned’ -- which later turned out to be false.”

And the 2004 coup against Aristide looked familiar to another infamous plot. It reeked of the operation that removed Jacobo Arbenz from power in Guatemala in 1954. In both cases, word of growing military opposition, headed toward the capital, was trumpeted daily in the media.

In both cases, the powers of that coming military opposition were grossly exaggerated. In both cases, had Arbenz or Aristide chosen to fight, they would likely have been able to hold their ground against the rag-tag forces that didn’t match the hype. But in both cases, neither leader knew this at the time.

Two Faces

Officially, of course, America pronounced that no one who overthrew the democratically elected leader of Haiti in a coup would be recognized as legitimate. But few in Haiti trusted those pronouncements.

As friends of Aristide, African-American activist Randall Robinson and his wife Hazel received a warning of a coming coup, which Robinson detailed in An Unbroken Agony.

On Feb. 28, 2004, radio talk show host Tavis Smiley called Robinson’s wife Hazel. Smiley was supposed to interview Aristide for his program the following day.

But Smiley told Hazel that he had heard from former Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums that Colin Powell had told Dellums that Guy Philippe (a former Haitian police chief who had trained with the U.S. Special Forces in Ecuador in the early 1990s) was leading a team to Port-au-Prince to kill Aristide and that the Bush administration was going to do nothing to prevent it.

Philippe had been openly boasting that on his birthday, Feb. 29, he would come to Port-au-Prince and kill the president.

Separately, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, called Hazel to offer help finding Aristide safe passage out of the country.

Hazel passed all this information along to Mrs. Aristide, who said thanks but no thanks, the president would not leave until he served out his full term.

Fearing Aristide and his wife might be killed, Hazel called Dellums and urged him to talk to the media, but her suggestion was met with silence.

Robinson called Peter Jennings and a couple of others in the media suggesting they talk to Dellums. All three called him back later to say Dellums declined to confirm the information. Someone had clearly set someone up. But who?

Robinson came to believe that Colin Powell had given Dellums bad information (that Phillipe was coming to attack, when in fact he was spotted leading his team in the opposite direction just days earlier).

Dellums, however, apparently believed the information, but wasn’t willing to jeopardize his relationship with Powell by confirming it, even though Powell appears to have deliberately leaked false information to Dellums in the hope that he would disclose it to frighten Aristide out of the country.

But that plan failed. So a different tack was taken.

Abdication or Abduction?

On Feb. 29, Hazel got a call from another Democratic Congresswoman from California: Maxine Waters, who said CNN was reporting that the Aristides had fled the country the night before. Hazel didn’t believe it, given the calm manner in which Mrs. Aristide had responded the day before.

In addition, Hazel was incensed. “Did you see what the networks did?” Hazel asked Waters. The networks had used old footage of Aristide getting on a commercial plane, using file video to give the impression of a man voluntarily leaving his country.

The next morning, Robinson received a call from Aristide, who told him, over a fragile line, “They brought us to the Central African Republic,” and, “Tell them for us it was a coup. …”

And then the line went dead.

Robinson later obtained a detailed statement from Frantz Gabriel, the president’s helicopter pilot, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army, of how Aristide was essentially kidnapped around 4:00 a.m. at gunpoint and removed from the presidential palace in Gabriel’s presence.

My first blog post ever at my Real History Blog was about this event. As I wrote at the time:

“I used to have the time to publish essays at my Real History Archives site, but with events moving so quickly, I realized what I really needed was a blog to keep up with the (dis)information being spewed at us daily.

“Today was a classic case in point. I had to get a blog up when I saw what was being done to the Aristide coup story. A typical headline told us that Aristide has stepped down from ruling Haiti to avoid bloodshed.

“But read a few more stories and you'll see that he said he was abducted, that this was a coup helped along by the US Government. Bush (I refuse to call an unelected man ‘President’) stated that Aristide resigned. But around the world, other voices have reason to doubt. You would too, if you knew the Real History ... stay tuned.”

It’s taken me until the recent earthquake to tell the rest of that sad story.

Aftermath

Had America let Aristide run his country, without interfering, or had the United States interfered only to protect the Haitian people from the Duvaliers, the Guy Philippes and the Andy Apaids, the suffering in Haiti would have been greatly lessened.

If Washington had let them have their loans for health care, infrastructure, and clean water, there might not be the degree of suffering that we are witnessing in Haiti today.

America bears a huge burden of responsibility for Haiti’s poverty and government dysfunction. But if Americans truly want to reduce Haiti’s suffering now, there must be an end to U.S. support for those who would exploit their own people for personal gain.

Let Haitians decide who will lead them and in what manner. The United States must let their light shine, in whatever direction they choose to point it. America must, for once, follow, and not lead. The Haitians know best what is in their own interest.

Piti, piti, wazo fe nich li. Little by little, they will rebuild their nest.

For Part One, click here.

Lisa Pease is a historian and writer who specializes in the mysteries of the John F. Kennedy era.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/013110d.html

[Magmak1]

Haiti: The Broken Wing

by MediaLens / February 3rd, 2010

It matters that the media have lavished so much attention on the aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. The coverage has helped inspire people around the world to give of their time, energy and money in responding to the disaster. On the Democracy Now! website last week, filmmaker Michael Moore described how almost 12,000 members of the US National Nurses Union had signed up to leave for Haiti immediately. Moore explained:

… the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union… I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.’ But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world’s despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti’s children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor.

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti’s case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti’s poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.1

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.2

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.3

The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti’s history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic’s tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development.”4

Aristide’s balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years.”5

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you’re gone.’… And that’s exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that’s precisely what happened — and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.6

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington’s harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors.7

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.”8

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.

Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles — notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian — that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti’s oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004.”

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti’s economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush’s administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.”

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers — the Guardian and the Independent — represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.

It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.

Of Devils And Dignity Lost

The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:

“Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti’s first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country’s relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994.”9

There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.

The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking.10

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes11

Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.

“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.”

And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: “Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster.”

The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years — too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti’s democratic institutions.”

In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west’s centuries of disregard.”12

Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.”

As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”

In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’

We wrote to Henley on January 26:

Hi Jon

In your January 14 Guardian article, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell,’ you discussed Haiti’s history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:

“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out.” (Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti’, The Nation, February 28, 2004)

Why did you make no mention of these issues?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Henley replied on January 27:

hi david
obviously i “did not once mention the role of the united states” (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism.
happy?
no seriously: the article was about haiti’s colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country’s pre-existing problems.
i’m sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti’s troubled history about which they knew nothing.
best wishes
jh
ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs’s comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn’t.

If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had “nothing to say to make sense of this horror”, while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond “not with clever argument but with prayer.” American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil… ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians – “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors’ efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten”.

Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.

Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine — they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.

More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.

Donate to Haiti.

1. Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008. [↩]
2. Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti.’ [↩]
3. Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti’s plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010. [↩]
4. Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 — The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209. [↩]
5. Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994. [↩]
6. Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157. [↩]
7. Quoted Noam Chomsky, ‘Democracy Restored,’ Z Magazine, November 1994. [↩]
8. Quoted Anthony Fenton, ‘Media vs. reality in Haiti,’ February 13, 2004. [↩]
9. ‘Barricades go up as city braces for attack’, Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004. [↩]
10. ‘From bad to worse’, Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004. [↩]
11. See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’ and Part 2. [↩]
12. Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010. [↩]

Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The first Media Lens book is Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media (Pluto Books, London, 2006). Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am and is filed under "Aid", Democracy, Haiti, Media.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/haiti-the-broken-wing/

[Magmak1]

Child Slavery in Haiti

by Stephen Lendman / February 3rd, 2010

In November 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognizing “that in all countries in the world, there are children living in exceptionally difficult conditions, and that such children need special consideration.” Then in May 2000, the General Assembly adopted an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.

In 1990, the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography with a mandate to investigate the problem and submit reports to the General Assembly.

Today, Gulnara Shahinian holds the post, and on June 10, 2009 addressed Haiti’s Restaveks, a century-old system under which impoverished families, mostly rural and unable to adequately provide for their children, send them to live with wealthier or less poor ones in return for food, shelter, education, and a better life in return for tasks performed as servants — de facto slaves subjected to verbal and physical abuse.

Some as young as three are beaten, forced to do anything asked, request nothing, speak only when spoken to, display no emotion, and receive none of the benefits parents expected, just exploitation and mistreatment that’s often severe. Too often it’s from relatives as poor families often send their children to live with those better able to provide care, yet they seldom do.

Haiti’s poor also use them to help with domestic and other chores, and some work for homeless families under the worst of conditions, including nothing to eat for days, harder work, greater abuse, at times whippings leaving scars, getting attacked by rats in their sleep or street predators any time, and being easy prey for kidnappers who seize them for prostitution or forced labor, internally or abroad.

On July 10, 2009, Shahinian released a report titled, “Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including the Right to Development” covering contemporary forms of slavery that affect adults and children.

She called it a global issue in traditional and emerging forms that haven’t been sufficiently addressed. She also found that where laws on forced labor exist, enforcement is limited, and “very few policies and programmes… address bonded labour.” They should given its scale worldwide, affecting an estimated 27 million people conservatively and very likely many more as much of the problem is unreported.

In March 2009, this writer addressed it in an article titled, “Modern Slavery in America.” It’s disturbing and pervasive despite US laws prohibiting all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) providing for imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties. Other laws were also enacted, including the 2003 Protect Act to end child exploitation.

Yet slavery exists in different forms, affecting farm workers, domestic help, factory and other sweatshop labor, restaurant and hotel work, guest workers on US military bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and most of all for prostitution and sex services that exploit children as well as adults.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as follows:

“… all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself (or herself) voluntarily.”

Forced child labor is:

(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;

( the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;

© the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties; (and)

(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.

The Free the Slaves.net’s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.”

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”

If sweatshop wage slavery is included, the problem is far greater, affecting many hundreds of millions of exploited workers globally, including a 2004 UNICEF estimate of about 218 million children performing labor (other than domestic), some as young as five, many in forced bondage, the majority doing hazardous work, and governments doing little or nothing to protect them.

On December 29, 1994, Haiti ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Under its provisions, authorities issue reports on the problem as required, but little else. Until he was ousted, however, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide addressed it. He created a special Haitian National Police child protection unit, and in 2003, got a new law passed prohibiting child domestic labor, mostly as Restaveks. Other legislation also passed banning trafficking in persons, a longstanding problem affecting adults as well.

Except for measures under Aristide, Haiti did little before or after his tenure to curb the problem, claiming a lack of resources. Instead, it established a hotline for children and others to report abuses, has a minimal staff, gets about 200 requests a year, visits homes for educational purposes, advises violators to stop their practices, occasionally removes abused children, but barely addresses the problem Shahinian called tantamount to slavery and condemned.

After a nine-day visit in early June, she said Haiti’s Restavek system:

deprives children of their family environment and violates their most basis rights such as the rights to education, health and food as well as subjecting them to multiple forms of abuse including economic exploitation, sexual violence and corporal punishment, violating their fundamental right to protection from all forms of violence.

She condemned professional recruiters who exploit children for financial gain and called for establishing a National Commission to eliminate the problem. She recommended registering all of them, providing alternative income generating programs for poor families, compulsory free primary education, and training for government officials to address the issue. Under the current Preval government, practically nothing has been done so far.

In June 2009, the US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report called Haiti a: “Special Case for the fourth consecutive year as the new government formed in September 2008 has not yet been able to address the significant challenges facing the country, including human trafficking.”

Urging its government “to take immediate action to address its serious trafficking-in-persons problems,” it was silent about America’s role in ousting Aristide and the fascist regime it installed. In collusion with Haitian elites, the result has been rampant oppression, sham elections, destruction of the majority democratic opposition, jails overflowing with political prisoners, and ending the beneficial political, economic and social changes Haitians briefly enjoyed.

Now the State Department calls Haiti a:

“source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation. Haitian women, men, and children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas, the United States, Europe, Canada, and Jamaica for exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and construction…. Several NGOs noted a sharp increase in the number of Haitian children trafficked for sex and labor to the Dominican Republic and The Bahamas during 2008,” the majority being Restaveks, including those trafficked internally.

Dismissed and runaway Restaveks comprise “a significant proportion of the large number of street children, who frequently are forced to work in prostitution or street crime by violent criminal gangs. Women and girls from the Dominican Republic are trafficked into Haiti for commercial sexual exploitation.”

Some Haitians in the Dominican Republic, The Bahamas and America become virtual slaves as forced labor on sugar-cane plantations, in agriculture and construction. To a large degree, America bears major responsibility, yet is silent and initiates no change.

The Restavek Foundation

Founder Jean-Robert Cadet was once one himself, “endur(ing) years of physical and emotional abuse as a domestic slave until he received access to education-first in Haiti and later in the United States.”

He now addresses the problem on his web site and by speaking at colleges and universities throughout America and to government organizations globally. He also uses his foundation to help trapped children, providing them opportunities for education, paying for their tuition, uniforms and books, feeding them once a day, monitoring their health and well-being, and restoring their dignity.

His mission is to end Haitian child slavery and give hope to those enslaved. The Restavek Foundation “invest(s) in Haiti so that Haiti will allow us to invest in the children” — through a network of over 500 advocates across the country acting as a “voice for the voiceless.”

In the aftermath of Haiti’s quake, the Foundation is providing food and other essentials to areas not reached by others. They need help and ask for donations on their web site.

Post-Quake Child Trafficking

On February 1, New York Times writer Ginger Thompson headlined, “Case Stokes Haiti’s Fear for Children, and Itself,” reporting that, on January 29, 10 Americans were detained at the Dominican border for illegally trying to spirit 33 children from the country.

“The 10 Americans, the authorities said, had crossed the line.” Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive called them “kidnappers (who) knew what they were doing was wrong.” National Judicial Police chief, Frantz Thermilus, said: “What surprises me is that these people would never do something like this in their own country.” He’s wrong as the US is beset with adult and child trafficking, and the problem is global.

Affiliated with two Idaho-based Baptist churches, the excuse given rings hollow, saying that: “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that. Our hearts were in the right place.”

They were headed for a Dominican Republic orphanage, existing only on paper, later to be “adopted” by US Evangelical Christian families. When stopped at the border, Haitian agents found them packed inside a bus. None had passports, and no documents authorized their transfer.

SOS Children’s Villages ran the Port-au-Prince orphanage where they were temporarily placed. Its regional director, Patricia Vargas, told Agence France Presse that “The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone number.” One eight-year child said “I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.” The Haitian Social Ministry confirmed that so did others. On January 30, SOS Villages was asked to help under the circumstances.

Its officials accused the Idaho group of taking “children under false pretenses. The allegations have to be thoroughly investigated but the Haitian police consider this incident as organized child trafficking.”

Laura Silsby heads the groups as CEO of a Boise-based online shopping web site called personalshopper.com. Last November, it filed papers with Idaho authorities to establish the New Life Children’s Refuge, ostensibly as an NGO. As part of their “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission,” they plan a Dominican Republic orphanage for up to 200 children, earmarked for US adoptions, conversion to Evangelical Christianity, and apparent extremist indoctrination, given Silsby’s admission that Sarah Palin and the Manhattan Initiative are two of her favorites, the latter a right-wing Evangelical group opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Although one scheme was stopped, UNICEF says, pre and post-quake, documented evidence shows many Haitian child abductions, including from hospitals, orphanages, and the street where so many are vulnerable.

The agency explained that pre-quake, Haiti had about 380,000 orphaned children. The number now is incalculable, but the message is clear. Many are on their own own to find food, shelter and medical care, making them vulnerable to traffickers for profit and exploitation.

In 2000, the UN adopted the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, then in 2003, its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. Under its provisions, trafficking is illegal, defined as:

Trafficking in persons (by) the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

Exploitation is defined, “at a minimum,” to include “prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.”

Anyone under 18 is considered a child, and State Parties are called on to adopt laws or other measures “to establish criminal offences” under the Convention. Haiti hasn’t done so, leaving its children vulnerable to trafficking and other abuses.

Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) Report on Child Trafficking in Haiti

In November 2009, PADF published a report titled, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti: Quantifying Child Trafficking, Restaveks & Victims of Violence.” It’s a disturbing picture of “extremely poor children who are sent to other homes to work as unpaid domestic servants,” and end up being beaten, sexually assaulted, and exploited by host families. Later, in their teens, “they are commonly tossed to the streets to fend for themselves and become victims of other types of abuses” because Haitian labor laws require employers to pay domestic workers over aged 15.

PADF studied the problem through “the largest field survey on human rights violations, with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse and violence.” It conducted 1,458 personal interviews in troubled urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitien, Gonaives, Saint-Marc and Petit-Goave and learned the following:

* children are moving from impoverished households to less poor ones;
* in urban areas, an estimated 225,000 children are Restaveks, two-thirds of them girls;
* the impoverished Cite Soleil Port-au-Prince neighborhood had the highest percentage of Restavek children – 44%;
* families in the southern peninsula communities of Les Cayes, Jacmel, Jeremie and Leogane supply the most Restaveks to Port-au-Prince;
* some children sent to host families for education aren’t classified as Restaveks, but perform similar duties;
* more than 7% of urban households report incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping, or gang involvement, but the true number is likely higher as many incidents go unreported; and
* Port-au-Prince households had over double the amount in other cities (16%).

Over 30% of surveyed households have Restavek children, affecting 16% of all children and 22% of them treated that way. Overall, study findings show Restaveks aren’t solely a rural phenomenon given the high proportion of urban households with them.

The majority of urban ones were born in rural Haiti, but urban households comprise the largest recruitment destination. All regions supply them, the most important being southern peninsula rural areas. In addition, many households take in children as school borders, the vast majority treated like Restaveks without the label, and some families with them also send their own children to live with host families in return for services performed.

Kinship is a prime and more socially acceptable recruiting source. However, family ties may camouflage poor treatment when children are away during the school year. They traditionally do household chores at home, but as Restaveks far more in an abusive environment.

PADF cited other issues, including:

* growing numbers of street children forced to beg to survive;
* young women (including underage adolescents) recruited for prostitution;
* Restavek cross-border trafficking to the Dominican Republic, including for sex;
* kidnappings to sell children and women into bondage; and
* violence in urban neighborhoods, including organized murder, rape, other physical assaults, and kidnappings committed by the Haitian National Police, UN MINUSTAH peacekeepers, other armed “authorities,” and politically partisan gangs.

PADF Summary of Key Findings

An “astonishing high percentage” of surveyed children live with host families — 32% and 30% of surveyed households had Restaveks present. Other findings included:

* 16% of all surveyed children were placed as Restaveks, and 22% were treated that way, including 44% in Cite Soleil;
* two-thirds of Restaveks are girls;
* poverty is the root cause of Restavek placements;
* a significant minority of Restavek households placed their own children with host families; yet kinship ties don’t shield them from abusive treatment, even for those sent only for the school year;
* “the magnitude of the intra-urban movement of children within… metropolitan area(s) is (a) significant new development;”
* most urban Restaveks were born in rural areas, but in Port-au-Prince, other households are the largest single source; thus Restavek recruitment no longer can be viewed solely as a rural to urban phenomenon;
* other victimization forms include rape, murder, kidnapping, and cross-border trafficking; and
* most abused victims don’t seek help from authorities because little is available, including in court.

Public Policy and Haitian Law

Haitian law doesn’t specifically prohibit trafficking internally or cross-border, so seeking judicial redress is futile, and the police child protection unit doesn’t pursue these cases because statutory restrictions don’t exist.

Nonetheless, in March 2009, the Haitian parliament ratified (but doesn’t enforce) the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The parliament is also considering a human trafficking law, but real social change was never before achieved, except under Aristide. Haitians have been oppressed for over 500 years. The current government has done nothing to change things, and now can’t under occupation.

A Final Comment

Given their overwhelming hardships, the last thing Haitians needed was the January 12 quake (the most destructive in the region in 170 years), affecting Port-au-Prince, surrounding areas, and other parts of the country, devastating the capital, killing many thousands, injuring many more, and disrupting the lives of three million or more people, adding to their crushing burden.

Many tens of thousands lost everything left stranded on their own, given the lack of essential aid most still aren’t getting. Everything is in shambles. Rubble is everywhere. The National Cathedral, Palace of Justice, and Supreme Court collapsed. So did hotels, other municipal buildings, business structures, schools and hospitals.

People still wander the streets dazed, searching for loved ones. The National Palace was heavily damaged, now under US control as a command center. So was UN headquarters, and many of its employees remain missing. In the wealthy Petionville neighborhood, a hospital, ministry building and private homes collapsed. So did other buildings across the capital and in rural communities like Leogane. Jacmel in the southeast also sustained major damage.

The Parliament collapsed. So did public buildings and hospitals, and those functioning are packed with victims or others queued outside waiting for treatment. The World Food Program (WFP) reached only 100,000 people as of January 31. On February 2, targeted vaccinations will begin that, according to the world’s foremost authority, Dr. Viera Scheibner, will exacerbate, not lessen the communicable disease problem as vaccines often cause the diseases they’re designed to prevent.

Enough food, clean drinking water and medical care remain urgent problems, the US occupation force doing nothing to help and actually obstructing aid deliveries by restricting incoming humanitarian flights and letting supplies stack up undelivered at the airport it controls. As a result, vital shipments are reaching a fraction of the millions who need them.

In its latest February 1 report, OCHA said hundreds of thousands of displaced Haitians need shelter provisions. Poor sanitation greatly increases the risk of communicable diseases and remains a huge challenge, and virtually all essential needs are in short supply.

It added:

Preliminary results from Port-au-Prince found that 93 percent of people surveyed said there was no adequate lighting; 93 percent said there were no latrines for women and men; 41 percent said the level of security was acceptable and 29 percent said it was very poor. The preliminary findings confirm that food, water, sanitation, health and shelter are the areas with the most urgent needs.

Before the tragedy, most Haitians had no running water, electricity, sanitation, or other public services leaving them on their own, virtually out of luck, and now out of it entirely with relief expected only for the privileged, not them beyond lip service and bare essentials, way short of what’s needed.

It’s an old story for some of the most abused, exploited, and neglected people anywhere, mostly by their powerful northern neighbor allied with Haitian economic elites; names like Acra, Apaid, Baussan, Biglo, Boulos, Brandt, Coles, Kouri, Loukas, Madsen, Mevs, Nadal, Sada, Vital, Vorbes, and other influential bourgeoisie interests exploiting their own people for profit.

Hundreds of thousands around the country are still coping with the damage that summer 2008 storms caused leaving them without food, clean water, other essentials, and around 70,000 homes destroyed. Gonaives, Haiti’s third largest city became uninhabitable. Most of Haiti’s livestock and food crops were destroyed as well as farm tools and seeds for replanting. Irrigation systems were demolished, and buildings throughout the country collapsed or were damaged, many severely. Now this, affecting Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas with the overall toll yet to be assessed.

For poor Haitians, it’s already known. Decimated by unimaginable hardships and deprivation, they’re on their own and out of luck because of the callous disregard for their lives and well-being – and their country now occupied for the duration.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. Contact him at: lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM-1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests. All programs are archived for easy listening. Read other articles by Stephen, or visit Stephen's website.

This article was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:00am and is filed under Anti-slavery, Children, Haiti, Poverty.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/child-slavery-in-haiti/

[Magmak1]

The Vultures Circle Haiti at Every Opportunity,Natural or Man-made

By Regan Boychuk

February 03, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Haitians’ incredible plight has always been difficult to fully appreciate. Then the earthquake struck: hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more hurt, a million homeless, and two million in need of food. It defies imagination.

And according to a journalist just returned from Haiti, even the heart-rending footage we’ve seen here on television fails to “portray the magnitude of the tragedy that has happened – and the degree to which the Haitian people are suffering. When looking at images from the disaster,” writes Steven Edwards, “we need to multiply by ten times our reaction of horror – only doing that can give you a true picture of what is going on in a place that has become hell not far from our shores.”i

Many Canadians, like millions of others the world over, have been moved to make donations to help Haiti recover from this tragedy. Fundraisers have been organized across the country and tens of millions of dollars are pouring in. The mayors of Canada’s 22 biggest cities are organizing to send municipal experts to Haiti to help rebuild roads, bridges, and other infrastructure.ii Such solidarity and support is no doubt welcome, but there are also other, less altruistic efforts afoot.

The morning after the earthquake, when the Red Cross released its first estimates of as many as 50,000 dead, the Globe and Mail ran an editorial advising the international community to “rethink its efforts in Haiti.” In particular, the editors of Canada’s leading newspaper agreed “a larger focus” on garment manufacturing in Haiti “could help the economy grow.” In this, the editors concluded, “Wealthy neighbours like the U.S. and Canada have a special responsibility” and “Canada can play a leading role.”iii

Such talk of sweatshops might seem more than a little garish the morning after such a disaster, but this was hardly the first time Haiti had been targeted for such ‘sweatshop development’ and foreign players are obviously eager to turn the exponential increase in the bitterness of Haitian existence into profitable lemonade.

I.

The Duvalier dictatorships (1957-86) killed tens of thousands of Haitians, but they also opened Haiti up to do assembly work for foreign corporations in the late 1960s. The tyrants were swiftly rewarded with a ten-fold increase in international aid – most of which was stolen or otherwise misspent, but donors didn’t much care as long as their business interests were being attended to.

Haitian workers were “closely supervised and controlled by the government”, which kept “wage rates at very low levels” – “undoubtedly… the single most important factor influencing the location of assembly industries in Haiti”, according to economist Monique Garrity. Even the World Bank admitted the “assembly industry is largely outside the Haitian economy” and made “no fiscal contribution.” During this experiment in sweatshop development between the 1970s and 1980s, absolute poverty in Haiti is estimated to have increased 60 per cent – from 50 to 80 per cent of the population.iv

While sweatshop development had profited foreign corporations and further impoverished Haitians, those that had allied themselves with foreign investors to exploit Haitian labor rose to new heights. In 1990, USAID described these “rapacious” new elites who’d “arisen to seize hold of the economy”:

These entrepreneurs have a 19th century approach to making money and have moved in to take advantage of the country’s massive and cheap labor pool. They run sweatshops, pay starvation wages and oppose any effort to improve the lot of the average impoverished Haitian.

Similarly, in a memo to the first President Bush, the chair of the US Congressional Task Force on Haiti described the “powerful businessmen who control the commanding heights of the Haitian economy”:

These personalities and their associates have been identified as being in the forefront of those financing thuggery and terror to intimidate the Haitian people and the democratic sector. …They fear that a freely elected government accountable to the Haitian people would intrude on their privileges and force them to compete in a world economy. Such a change would threaten their short-term interests and for this they have and continue to finance an apparatus of terror to block change.v

In the country’s first democratic election in December 1990, Haiti’s poor majority managed to elect a president to represent their interests. Within months, Haiti’s elite removed the country’s first democratically elected government in a US-backed coup. At the time of the coup, the government had been moving to guarantee the right to organize unions, to reform the labor courts, to increase the minimum wage, to restart and restructure the workers’ national health and benefits program, and to bar the military from intervening in workplace disputes. The National Labor Committee described the situation a year and a half after the coup:

The maquiladora sector had been 50-70 per cent organized. After the coup, the factories fired all the union-affiliated workers. Now companies pay whatever they want. It’s impossible to even talk about [improving] wages or working conditions. …Following the September 1991 coup, peasant organizers were hunted down like animals by the military.vi

Within months of the coup, US corporations with business interests in Haiti asked for and received exemptions from the embargo designed to bring down the military junta controlling Haiti. On 4 February 1992, President Bush I exempted American companies assembling goods in, or sourcing production in Haiti from the embargo. The US Treasury Department even handed out these licenses to companies controlled by well-known coup organizers. When the National Labor Committee asked one factory owner why he could not pay his workers enough to survive, he explained that, when the embargo was lifted, many US companies let it be known that they would continue contracting assembly work in Haiti only if their costs were lowered. His factory was paying its Haitian workers 27 cents an hour, a starvation wage. Other factories paid as little as nine. “There was a union before the coup,” the same factory owner said, “but afterwards the repression was too great. The military was hunting them. They were afraid and fled Port-au-Prince. Now, we have no union.”vii

Not only had sweatshop development pushed Haiti’s poor majority further into poverty, but it also gave birth to vicious and rapacious new elite that oversaw the murder of thousands of members of Haiti’s pro-democracy movement in the years after the 1991 coup.

When Haiti’s elected government was returned from exile in 1994, it was on condition that it adopt a variety of economic policies dictated by the West. In January 1995, the Haitian government announced a package of special incentives to attract foreign investment, which included subsidies for the rich and tax incentives for business. In April, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was set to propose new minimum wage of 75 gourdes per day, but under pressure from international donors, accepted a compromise of 36 gourdes (~$2.40 a day/30 cents an hour). According to the National Labor Committee’s investigation, the institutionalization of the 36 gourdes/day wage meant minimum wage workers in Haiti had less buying power than they did before Aristide’s election in 1990 and almost 50 per cent less in real terms than when the Duvalier dictatorship first set a minimum wage in 1980. Working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week would provide less than 60 per cent of a family’s basic needs. Many of the corporations profiting from the exploitation of Haitian workers were household names: Disney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, JC Penny, Sears, and Hanes/Sara Lee. Many companies paid just 11 cents per hour.viii

II.

In 2000, the democratically elected government of Haiti was again too much a ‘threat’ to Haiti’s elite and their foreign friends. After undermining it for years, the US – joined this time by Canada and France – succeeded in overthrowing it in a February 2004 coup. Two years of terror followed, with thousands more culled from Haiti’s pro-democracy movement.ix

The un-elected regime imposed on Haiti after the coup was led by a business consultant from Florida and within months had developed a comprehensive two-year economic and social plan for Haiti, called the International Cooperation Framework (ICF). It was developed “by about 300 mostly foreign technicians and consultants, some 200 from institutions like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank,” according to journalist Jane Regan. The plan “calls for more free trade zones, stresses tourism and export agriculture, and hints at the eventual privatization of the countries state enterprises.” And despite the plan’s claim, “The government wishes to undertake a national reconciliation process by involving all components of society”, Regan noted that “Almost no one from the country’s large and experienced national non-government organization (NGO) community, the local and national peasant associations, unions, women’s groups or the hundreds of producers cooperatives or numerous associations was invited to participate” in the preparation of the economic plan.x

There were also plans to present the next elected government with a medium-term ‘poverty reduction strategy’ to cover 2006-9, based on the ICF. Such a proposal would confront Haiti’s next elected government with a fait accompli effectively limiting the scope of its freedom to pursue policy. What the US and its allies were not able to impose on President Aristide during his 1991-94 exile or pressure the Haitian government into accepting since the return to democracy in 1994, they finally accomplished with the ICF. As an unusually frank World Bank report noted: “The transition period and the Transitional Government provide a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms with the involvement of civil society stakeholders that may be hard for a future government to undo.”xi

Canada took full advantage of this “window of opportunity”. Canadian Ambassador Claude Boucher and the US-installed regime created a Haitian-Canadian Chamber of Commerce and, in October 2004, Canada sent its first trade mission since before President Aristide’s re-election nearly five years earlier. It just happened to be a period of particularly intense repression in Haiti, with a myriad of pro-democracy demonstrations attacked by paramilitaries and the Canadian-trained police. A few weeks later, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin traveled to Haiti, in part, to help bolster the legitimacy of the repressive regime imposed after the coup.xii

On the eve of Prime Minister Martin’s trip, his office published a backgrounder stating that most tariffs and quotas on Haitian exports to Canada had been eliminated on many “textile and apparel goods, an important and promising sector for Canadian investment.” A delegation of the Haiti Accompaniment Project that had visited Haiti a few months earlier reported:

There has been a crackdown on labor unions and peasant associations. …We met with a labor union organizer who told us of a steadily mounting anti-union campaign directed at the assembly sector. He has received many reports from workers who say that factory owners are not respecting the minimum wage, which was raised last year by the Aristide government. In addition, three hundred workers have been fired from a Grupo M factory in the free trade zone along the Dominican border.xiii

Canadian garment manufacturer Gildan rushed to expand operations in Haiti after the coup. Two days after the Haiti regime announced a tax holiday, the press was reporting Gildan’s announcement it was closing a plant in Honduras and transferring production to Haiti. Vice President Stephane Lemay was not kidding when he told the press the decision to close the plant “was made quite recently” – even ten days earlier, a company profile in the Globe and Mail’s business section made no mention of any plans to shift operations to Haiti. By April 2005, CIBC World Markets analyst Ronald Schwarz believed that, despite “a surge in imports of textiles from China”, “Gildan’s manufacturing is among the most cost-competitive in the industry.” Schwarz added, “Gildan’s labor costs in countries such as Haiti and Honduras are actually cheaper than those in China”. Gildan’s second quarter results for 2005 surpassed the company’s most optimistic forecasts.xiv

(In January 12th’s earthquake, one of Gildan’s contractors’ building collapsed with about 1,000 workers inside. According to a Gildan executive, “It appears there are no survivors.” The New York Times described it as “probably one of the largest losses of life in a single location”. A graphic illustration of largely imaginary ‘security’ concerns thwarting rescue efforts, search and rescue teams didn’t arrive at the factory for four days. “Earlier, American rescue teams were cautioned against going into neighborhoods southwest of downtown, including Carrefour, that were perceived as too dangerous.”xv)

III.

In a recent evaluation of the impact sweatshop development (my term, not hers) has had on Haiti, Canadian political scientist Yasmine Shamsie notes that “The World Bank is an enduring supporter of this approach, and Haiti’s two most important bilateral donors, Canada and the United States, strongly endorse the model.” She adds, “Sixty-five percent of Haiti’s budget comes from external sources:

…Given this level of dependence, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Haitian government’s economic development strategy will be informed by the economic policy of liberalism and export-led development that international donors espouse. …In short, their development trajectory must conform to the exigencies of neoliberal globalization.xvi

As it was put in the business pages, Haiti needs “a brisk shot of laissez-faire”. Setting aside for the moment the fact that such strategies are not how the wealthy countries developed themselves, it is worth recalling here Henry Kissinger’s remarks on our “age of the expert”: the “expert has his constituency – those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining [these vested interests’] consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert.”xvii With this little piece of wisdom in mind, it is much easier to make sense of who is considered an expert on developing Haiti and what sort of advice they have to offer.

Paul Collier is an Oxford economist and former director of development research at the World Bank who “wants to persuade you that external military intervention has an important place in helping” those who live in poor countries. Collier also argues that, “The challenge posed by coups is not to eliminate them but to harness them.”xviii After the Canada/US/France-backed 2004 coup and subsequent years of military occupation by UN forces, small wonder Collier found himself asked how Haiti could develop. Collier’s answer came in a January 2009 report to UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, “Haiti: From catastrophe to economic security”. In essence, he recommends sweatshops assembling garments for the North American market as Haiti’s best hope.xix

Demonstrating either his ignorance or mendacity on Canada’s role in undermining, overthrowing, and suppressing Haitian democracy for the past decade, Collier has also said “Canada is by far the most welcome in the country because you’re not tainted by history. …So you’ve got a very important role. The Haitian government in a way, sort of trusts you more, and is comfortable in a way it’s not comfortable with others.” The Canadian government obviously liked what Collier had to say. As the minister responsible for international aid through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) explained a few months before the earthquake, “Haiti would have been historically a large producer of textiles and garment exporting to North America. It lost that industry and now we’re looking at how we can rejuvenate the industry there.”xx

Carlo Dade is executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas and the most prominent expert on the region in the Canadian media. On Haiti, Dade’s “pushing the private sector agenda” “has led to a great deal of frustration” for him, so he’s naturally a fan of Collier’s plan and has praised CIDA for its “championing of Paul Collier’s work on Haiti.” “Dade argues that despite criticism over sweatshops, working in a North American-run factory is a better option than what’s now available to young Haitians”, the Ottawa Citizen reported. “And he says the garment manufacturers are eager to go back.”xxi

The morning after the earthquake in Haiti, the Globe and Mail editors endorsed Collier’s plan and offered him space on the op-ed page to promote it, with a tweak – since Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince was largely destroyed, the sweatshops should be set up in the much less affected north of the country.xxii The following week, Dade was invited to the op-ed pages to inform readers that the Canadian government “had a good track record in Haiti on which to build” on “what has worked in Haiti, such as the 2004 multi-donor Interim Co-operation Framework” – the economic plan imposed on Haiti by outsiders after the 2004 coup.xxiii

Upping the ante considerably, a week after the earthquake, the Globe and Mail called Haiti a “perennial failed state”, noted that its “government is not governing”, and boldly recommended Canada, the US, and France (along with token Bahamas) should “work together and, with the fragments of Haitian government, remake the Haitian state.” Haiti “should not be turned into a protectorate of the United States or the United Nations” per se, but “Instead, a small, well concentrated committee of the major nations chiefly concerned” – coincidentally those most responsible for the 2004 coup and consequent repression – “should be formed to work with what remains of the Haitian government”.xxiv That’s one way to ensure your vision of sweatshop development in Haiti is implemented, simply assume control of the country – for Haitians own good, it goes without saying. From what I can tell, there has been little or no reaction to the Globe’s radical proposal.

IV.

Our good will and donations cannot be entrusted to the governments and their ‘experts’ that have played such a destructive role in Haiti’s recent history. Left to their own devices, we can safely expect more of the same: ‘development’ in the interest of foreign donors partnered with Haiti’s ‘rapacious’ elite, exploiting Haiti’s poor majority, paying ‘starvation wages’, and ‘opposing any effort to improve the lot of the average impoverished Haitian’. In the past, sweatshop development has only exacerbated Haitian poverty and, as the World Bank noted, it makes no significant fiscal contribution to the government. It improved corporate bottom lines, not the lives of Haitians. There is no reason to expect any different this time around.

Despite the impression you might have been left with from the media, Haitians are perfectly capable of managing their own affairs and know what they need a hell of a lot better than we do. Now, more than ever, Haitians deserve better from us and it is up to us to ensure our government does the right thing, not the profitable thing.

Three obvious places to start are forgiving what remains of Haiti’s debt, ensuring Haiti enjoys genuinely democratic elections in the very near future, and immediately ending former President Aristide’s unconstitutional exile. The IMF has recently announced would work to eliminate Haiti’s remaining debt, freeing much needed resources for recovery. These efforts deserve the support of the Canadian government – especially since the IMF is already backing away from them: at the donors’ conference in Montreal less than a week later, an IMF spokesperson dismissed calls for immediate debt relief saying, “Debt relief is not a today issue, it’s a tomorrow issue”.xxv

Each of the elections held or planned in Haiti since the 2004 coup have excluded what remains by every credible measure the most popular political party in Haiti, the Lavalas movement associated with former President Aristide. Not only has this fact been ignored here in the West, but one can read from an academic specialist in Canada’s most liberal newspaper that the current Haitian president that oversaw this continued exclusion of Lavalas is “by far the most stable and sensible [president] the country has ever had”.xxvi Translation: His government does our bidding, which has included continuing to privatize Haiti’s few remaining public assets and vetoing an increase in the minimum wage to $5/day. For genuine recovery, Haitians need to be empowered and that requires elections including the country’s majority political party. Foreign donors monitor and fund those elections and could ensure as much with a proverbial phone call.

In the wake of January 12th’s tragedy, Haiti’s current government has remained largely silent as foreign powers have prioritized ‘security’ over maximizing rescue efforts. Millions of Haitians were left suffering – and dying – in the aftermath of earthquake. Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is Haiti’s most popular and influential figure by a wide margin but pressure from the same countries that overthrew his government in 2004 has kept him in exile despite countless calls for his return. He has said he has no interest in political office and, indeed, he is not eligible to serve as president again, but he is needed now more than ever. “If he were to return, people would mobilise. Tens of thousands would mobilise like that,” according to filmmaker Kevin Pina, probably the single most intimately connected and knowledgeable outsider on Haiti’s pro-democracy movement. “With just picks and shovels they would clean up the mess in just a month. They still love him that much.”xxvii

Regan Boychuk is part of the Canada Haiti Action Network <canadahaitiaction.ca> and is currently editing a book on Canada’s role in Haiti for Athabasca University Press.



i Steven Edwards, “Reality in Haiti is even worse than it looks”, Canwest News Service, 21 January 2010.

ii “Canadian mayors promise to help rebuild Haiti”, CBC News, 21 January 2010.

iii Editorial, “Today’s rescue is just the beginning”, Globe and Mail, 13 January 2010.

iv Monique Garrity, “The assembly industries in Haiti: Causes and effects”, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Spring 1981; Michael Hooper, “Model underdevelopment”, NACLA Report on the Americas, May/June 1987 (World Bank); William Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US intervention, and hegemony (New York: Cambridge University, 1996), p. 271 (poverty).

v National Labor Committee, “Haiti after the coup: Sweatshop or real development”, April 1993, pp. 47-48 (USAID); Walter Fauntroy, “Haiti: What must be done”, memorandum to President George Bush, 3 March 1989 reprinted in James Ridgeway (ed.), The Haiti Files: Decoding the crisis (Washington: Essential/Azul, 1994), p. 35.

vi National Labor Committee, “Haiti after the coup”, pp. 77-78, 84.

vii National Labor Committee, “Haiti after the coup”, pp. 45, 23-24, 31-32.

viii Lisa McGowan, “Democracy undermined, economic justice denied: Structural adjustment and the aid juggernaut in Haiti”, Development Group for Alternatives Polices, January 1997, sec. 4; National Labor Committee, “The US in Haiti: How to get rich on 11 cents an hour”, January 1996, pp. 17, 25, 26.

ix See Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the politics of containment (London: Verso, 2007); Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton, Canada in Haiti: Waging war on the poor majority (Halifax: Fernwood, 2006); Athena R. Kolbe and Royce A. Hutson, “Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: A random survey of households”, Lancet, 2 September 2006 and “Clarification: Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti”, Lancet, 3 February 2007.

x Jane Regan, “A national plan without the people?”, Inter-Press Service, 21 July 2004; Republic of Haiti, “Interim cooperation framework 2004-2006”, July 2004, p. 8.

xi World Bank and International Development Association, “Haiti briefing note”, 2 July 2004, para. 10, p. 3 (poverty reduction strategy); World Bank, “Haiti - Economic governance reform operation project”, 10 December 2004, p. 4 (‘window of opportunity’).

xii “Canadian business mission in Haiti”, Agence France-Presse, 22 October 2004; Lamar Litz, “Attacks against demonstrations in Haiti: A compilation of reports”, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, September 2005 and Hallward, Damming the Flood, pp. 277-86 (period of repression); Brian Laghi, “Internal strife will undermine rebuilding plan, PM tells Haiti”, Globe and Mail, 15 November 2004 (legitimacy).

xiii Office of the Prime Minister, “Prime minister to travel to Haiti”, 12 November 2004; Laura Flynn, Robert Roth, and Leslie Fleming, “Report of the Haiti Accompaniment Project”, 29 June – 9 July 2004.

xiv “Montreal-based T-shirt maker Gildan Activewear to close Honduran plant”, Canadian Press, 15 July 2004; Bertrand Marotte, “Gildan takes T-shirt making to the cutting-edge of casual apparel”, Globe and Mail, 3 July 2004; Carolyn Leitch, “Analysts upsize Gildan targets”, Globe and Mail, 12 April 2005 (Schwarz).

xv Tavia Grant, “Firms see beyond disaster”, Globe and Mail, 19 Janaury 2010 (executive); Deborah Sontag, “Defiant vow to rebuild amid ruins and bodies”, New York Times, 19 January 2010 (rescue efforts).

xvi Yasmine Shamsie, “Export processing zones: The purported glimmer in Haiti’s development murk”, Review of International Political Economy, October 2009. My quotes here are from a pre-publication draft.

xvii Neil Reynolds, “A dose of economic freedom will help heal Haiti”, Globe and Mail, 20 January 2010 (laissez-faire); Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development strategy in historical perspective (London: Anthem, 2003) and Bad Samaritans: The myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008) (how the West developed); Henry A. Kissinger, “Domestic structure and foreign policy”, Daedalus, Spring 1966 (experts).

xviii Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why to poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it (Oxford: Oxford University, 2007), ch. 8 (military intervention) and Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in dangerous places (London: Bodley Head, 2009), ch. 6 (coups).

xix Paul Collier, “Haiti: From catastrophe to economic security”, Report for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, January 2009.

xx Laura Payton, “Haiti: Canada’s second-biggest aid recipient still needs ‘everything’”, Ottawa Citizen, 15 September 2009.

xxi Carlo Dade, “Haiti’s economic prospects ‘hopeful’”, FOCALPoint, March 2009 (frustration); Carlo Dade, letter-to-the-editor, Globe and Mail, 11 June 2009 (CIDA/Collier); Payton, “Haiti: Canada’s second-biggest aid recipient still needs ‘everything’” (sweatshops).

xxii Editorial, “Four to help refound the state”, Globe and Mail, 19 January 2010; Paul Collier and Jean-Louis Warnholz, “We need a Marshall Plan for Haiti”, Globe and Mail, 13 January 2010.

xxiii Carlo Dade, “It’s up to Canada to grab the Haitian brass ring”, Globe and Mail, 22 January 2010.

xxiv Editorial, “Four to help refound the state”, Globe and Mail, 18 January 2010.

xxv “IMF chief calls for ‘Marshall Plan’ for shattered Haiti”, IMF Survey, 20 January 2010; Mike Blanchfield, “Harper-Clinton say accountability of funds key to Haiti recovery plan”, Canadian Press, 25 January 2010.

xxvi Jorge Heine, “After the mayhem, the real challenge is to fix Haiti”, Toronto Star, 15 January 2010. Heine is writing a book on Haiti’s governance.

xxvii Andrew Buncombe, “Discovered by Columbus, built by France – and wrecked by dictators”, Independent, 16 January 2010.



http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24582.htm



See also VIDEO: Haitian Realities Contrast With Stereotypes
Interview with Jean Saint-Vil

by Ish Theilheimer

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...a&aid=17351

[Frenchy]

CNN Breaking News Thursday, February 4, 2010 2:44

Haiti charges American missionaries with kidnapping children and criminal association, a government official says.

[believe_it]

This update to post #119 just staggering, IMO.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/am...as/12haiti.html



February 12, 2010

Adviser to Detained Americans in Haiti Is Investigated

By MARC LACEY and IAN URBINA


Jorge Puello, who has been providing legal advice to a group of Americans jailed in Haiti.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The police in El Salvador have begun an investigation into whether a man suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls is also a legal adviser to the Americans charged with trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission.

When the judge presiding over the Haitian case learned on Thursday of the investigation in El Salvador, he said he would begin his own inquiry of the adviser, a Dominican man who was in the judge’s chambers days before.

The inquiries are the latest twist in a politically charged case that is unfolding in the middle of an earthquake disaster zone. A lawyer for the group has already been dismissed after being accused of trying to offer bribes to get the 10 Americans out of jail.

The adviser, Jorge Puello, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that he had not engaged in any illegal activity in El Salvador and that he had never been in the country. He called it a case of mistaken identity. “I don’t have anything to do with El Salvador,” he said, suggesting that his name was as common in Latin America as John Smith is in the United States.

“There’s a Colombian drug dealer who was arrested with 25 IDs, and one of them had my name,” he said, not elaborating.

“Bring the proof,” he said when pressed about the child-trafficking accusations in the brief interview, which ended when he said he was entering an elevator. Reached later, he became angry and said he had broken no laws.

The 10 Americans have been imprisoned since Jan. 29 in the back of the same police station used by President René Préval as the seat of Haiti’s government since the earthquake. They had been told by their lawyers that at least some of them would be on their way home on Thursday. But the judge overseeing their case, Bernard Saint-Vil, recommended to the prosecutor that they be tentatively released from custody and permitted to leave the country as long as a representative stayed behind until the case was completed.

Mr. Puello has been acting as a spokesman and legal adviser for the detainees in the Dominican Republic.

The head of the Salvadoran border police, Commissioner Jorge Callejas, said in a telephone interview that he was investigating accusations that a man with a Dominican passport that identified him as Jorge Anibal Torres Puello led a human trafficking ring that recruited Dominican women and under-age Nicaraguan girls by offering them jobs and then putting them to work as prostitutes in El Salvador.

Mr. Puello said he did not even have a passport. When Mr. Callejas was shown a photograph taken in Haiti of Mr. Puello, Mr. Callejas said he thought it showed the man he was seeking. He said he would try to arrest Mr. Puello on suspicion of luring women into prostitution and taking explicit photographs of them that were then posted on Internet sites. “It’s him, the same beard and face,” Mr. Callejas said in an interview on Thursday. “It has to be him.”

Judge Saint-Vil also said he thought that the photo of the trafficking suspect in a Salvadoran police file appeared to be the same man he had met in court. He said he intended to begin his own investigation into whether a trafficking suspect had been working with the Americans detained in Haiti.

“I was skeptical of him because he arrived with four bodyguards, and I have never seen that from a lawyer,” the judge said in an interview. “I plan to get to the bottom of this right away.”

The judge said he would request assistance from the Department of Homeland Security to look into Mr. Puello’s background. A spokesman for the department said American officials were playing a supporting role in the investigation surrounding the Americans, providing “investigative support as requested.”

An Interpol arrest warrant has been issued for someone named Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, according to the police and public documents.

There were questions about whether Mr. Puello, the adviser, who said the Central Valley Baptist Church in Idaho had hired him to represent the Americans, was licensed to practice law. Records at the College of Lawyers in the Dominican Republic listed no one with his name.

Mr. Puello said he had a law license and was part of a 45-member law firm. But his office in Santo Domingo turned out to be a humble place, which could not possibly fit 45 lawyers. Mr. Puello’s brother Alejandro said that the firm had another office in the central business district, but he declined to provide an address.

Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had been representing the Americans free of charge because he was a religious man who commiserated with their situation. “I’m president of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I help people in this kind of situation. We’re not going to charge these people a dime.”

But other lawyers for the detainees said that the families had wired Mr. Puello $12,000 to pay for the Americans’ transportation out of Haiti if they were released, and that they had been told by Mr. Puello in a conference call late Tuesday that he needed an additional $36,000. Mr. Puello said that he had not participated in a conference call.

One lawyer for the families said that Mr. Puello had told him that he was licensed to practice law in Florida, but the lawyer said he had checked and found no such record. Mr. Puello said in the interview that he had never said he was licensed in Florida.

Mr. Puello said that he had been born in Yonkers, N.Y., and that his mother was Dominican. He said that his full name was Jorge Puello and that he had no other names. But then in a subsequent interview he said his name was Jorge Aaron Bentath Puello. He said he was born in October 1976, and not in October 1977, which the police report indicates is the birth date of the suspect in the Salvadoran case.

The report said the police had found documents connected to the Sephardic Jewish community in a house in San Salvador where the traffickers had held women.

Blake Schmidt contributed reporting from San José, Costa Rica, and Jean-Michel Caroit from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
.

None of these people should get a pass because they purport to be religious.